RoadTest: Sign Up to Review the Nordic Wi-Fi 6 IC Dev Kit nRF7002 DK with WI-Fi 6 Router
Author: s2000gt
Creation date:
Evaluation Type: Evaluation Boards
Did you receive all parts the manufacturer stated would be included in the package?: True
What other parts do you consider comparable to this product?: None that I know of
What were the biggest problems encountered?: "Getting started" steps not well documented, had to follow poor quality video for initial provisioning, setting up toolchain long process and difficult to get working properly at first
Detailed Review:
Out of Box Experience
First, thank you to Nordic and the Element 14 team for allowing me to experience this obviously very powerful development platform.
My goal was to look at this not as an experienced chip developer, but as a first time user of both the Nordic chip platform as well as
the nRF Connect tools and VS Code toolchain.
Besides the development board and antenna, the only included documentation was a simple card with a link to nordicsemi.com/start7002dk
While this provided access to the provisioning hex file, nRF Connect for Windows and a User guide. I never did see what I would call a getting
started guide. I ended up doing the initial install of nRf Connect and writing the hex file using the programmer app based on watching a Nordic
video which was hard to understand because of the speakers, i'm assuming, Norwegian accent and the poor video quality, but it worked.
To me though a "Getting Started" is a simple, concise document that gets your up and running with minimal effort. But this is a high end
development board and not an Arduino board so i guess that should be expected.
Toolchain Install
Next up was the install of the development toolchain, Zephyr, and VS, again all new for me. Fortunately, this was mostly an automated process,
thanks to the nRF Toolchain Manager app. However when all was said and done, I could not get anywhere with VS Code. Not sure if I missed something,
but i did have to restart over, this time with SDK 2.4.0 and this time it worked. Issue with SDK 2.4.1 or me, who knows. While i did appreciate the automated
process, the environmental setup time was painfully long. Also at this time, i discovered Nordic's "Training Academy" which helped immensely with the steps
to take in VS Code especially with application settings and additional extensions needed to be loaded. Compile and Write operation worked fantastic and i had
my first WiFi scanner sample thanks to Zephyr.
What did I like about Nordic and this RoadTest?
First, the kit. This is an incredibly powerful development board that could take years to fully explore. I've barely
scratched the surface of looking at what all is possible with this unit and I'm looking forward to doing just that.
Second, VS Code. I've never been a Visual Studio user, but from the little I've explored, it offers so much potential
for future development and I'm eager to learn more.
And finally, the Nordic DevAcademy. With all the seemingly endless amounts of documentation on Nordics website,
this simple training tool is the best thing Nordic could have provided.
https://academy.nordicsemi.com/courses/nrf-connect-sdk-fundamentals/
Final Suggestions
As I initially suggested, I would really like to see a true 'Getting Started' document. Yes, most people buying this
kit will be highly experienced developers already very familiar with getting a kit like this up and running, but you know, sometime
there's the person who just wants to tinker and needs that extra support. Who knows, that may exist somewhere in Nordic's massive
online database, I just didn't see it.
