So, interviewing the nRF51822 - a chip famous for being hackable-as - using the official "evaluation kit". Which means a development kit but not as expensive as the actual development kit.

I "out the boxed" it a few days ago, did what the instructions said and had it doing it's funky thing within minutes. Unfortunately it uses the Keil IDE which at $4k/seat is not really a hobbyist solution but there is "support" for Eclipse. Oh yes. Support. There's lots of moving SDK's to non-default locations, download bits and pieces and gluing them together in Eclipse ... however, it at least appears to work. But, ignore the man behind the curtain! Of the provided examples only one ships with an Eclipse project and it just happens to be the one used in the tutorial. Creating a project? Compiling? Uploading? Up to you, matey. The makefiles appear well written but documentation is more or less zero. I had a shit of a time getting it to compile and go, and the feeling that when something goes wrong I'm going to end up blaming my really-quite-clueless bumbling around inside makefiles as the cause. Damn.

So today I'll try Keil again. You can rent it for $1500/year and if I'm actually putting some serious time into this I'm not a damn hobbyist :) I also reckon Keil is a better investment than yet another 3d printer. More security devices, fewer plastic bunnies.