So you went for Zephyr after all? The bare metal SDK was bigger pain?

Yes - well, it turns out the 'bare metal' SDK is just a hack on top of zephyr's build system. So it's not really all that different to develop for, but for bare metal you have to download zephyr and the bare metal libraries. And then Nordic's software team have randomly renamed most of the NRF API functions that I'd hoped would be the same anyway.

So you have a more difficulties, but you don't get any of the extras that Nordic supposedly give you only in Zephyr (like "Find my" support).

But honestly, I'm totally fed up with Nordic at this point. I will be trying to avoid using any of their new chips going forward.

For example I've just been trying to get the microphone working - it should be pretty straightforward. The ADC has its own timer, and DMA, and I can just point it at a memory area, tell it how fast to run and it'll work. It's maybe 10 registers to set. Instead, Zephyr's API doesn't quite support what you need for gapless recording. So once I figured that out I have to rewrite to use Nordic's NRF libs, which then conflict with their Zephyrs libs, and which have also been randomly refactored multiple times over the last 2 years, so there are no usable examples on the internet that work any more, and even AI can't seem to work out what to do.

And let's not even start on QSPI in nRF54L15, which is so poor it's faster using normal SPI.

Oh, that doesn't look very good indeed. When I first saw the ESP-IDF for ESP32 chips I was thinking oh boy that is quite complicated for a typical embedded SDK, but Nordic easily beats them now with the complexity.

And let's not even start on QSPI in nRF54L15, which is so poor it's faster using normal SPI.

oh, it is probably that new Risc-V Flipper core doing those "SoftPeripherals" - when seeing that some time ago it felt a bit odd and overcomplicated thing to do QSPI. Also when thinking that PSRAM and SPI flash are now often directly mapped to CPU memory on other platforms this is pretty strange decision.

but Nordic easily beats them now with the complexity.

So much so that you can't even install it on Linux in an encrypted home directory, because the paths in the SDK are so long the encryption system can't handle them!

oh, it is probably that new Risc-V Flipper core doing those "SoftPeripherals"

It is, yes. I wouldn't mind if it worked - but not being memory mapped is a real pain, and it's limited to 8mhz so it's more like a toy than anything useful.

and it's limited to 8mhz so it's more like a toy than anything useful.

well, according to this it could go even to 64 MHz on nrf54L https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-nrfxlib/blob/main/softperipheral/doc/sQSPI/sqspi_nrf54L_series_porting_v1_2_1.rst#high-speed-transfers will try to test it on this device

Well, that is not a good reason so I hope it could be more useful :-) If you take it apart the 1.8V levels may make things a bit more complicated for interfacing. There is a builtin magnet on the back so it sticks well to fridge and audio is loud so could be some egg timer or something :-)

I have more than 15 Magic3's and some 50 tenstar nanos, I am future proof, I can play around till my end. But following your efforts was always the best way to learn new things, so it is worth it :)

The AGPS is now fixed again - they updated their certificates.

Thanks a lot! I use it about every 3 days and for last week(s) including yesterday I don't have gps track in my runs (EDIT: oh sorry, wrote this part days ago, it works). It was almost perfect to just touch the agps app, leave phone on table and go. Without it I mostly don't get a fix at all once I start running.

I guess it's possible that just sampling the Ublox files (assistnow) and Casic ones from https://www.espruino.com/agps/ at various points and asking AI to see if it can find a mapping between the two might help

Yes, at first I just pointed the free chatgpt at it and it went into happy babbling how easy it is and how the structure of that binary file is just set of CASIC commands for the gps and the structure of the command GPSEPH with ephemerides makes sense and then went into ideas how to make such message from the public RINEX data and how to predict the satellites like ublox assist technologies do. Funnily most info it got about CASIC were threads here on this forum :-) And of course after tons of verbose and excited fluff the 'Chat paused until usage resets at 3:47 PM' :-) Anyway i will look into it with deepseek again. And I finally found settings/personalization in chatgps to make it less annoying.

Amazing times. :)

Yes. Over the weekend I let it code bed clock with alarms done by sidplayer so today morning I was woken up by The Last Ninja 1 Tune 2 Palace Gardens. I did not write single line of code. But I listened to lot of sids, the sound from it is quite good. one screen is sidplayer with all controls and another screen with alarms can set currently playing sid as tune for the alarm. The idle screen just shows big segmented clock with small date and every minute it is moving to avoid possible burn in and also rotating if it was moved to landscape/portrait and adjusting brightness. there are 3 levels of auto brightness settable by lux levels. Sids can be uploaded over BLE, zephyr already have service for it and there is a filesystem, even the original firmware uses it. there is autoswitching for sid chip types and it made a sid script for me that scans the sids in a folder and add files with song lenghts from the HVSC so skipping between sid tunes works automatically. It is basically done now and I'll see how it lasts on battery in this always on mode. I'll try to clean it up a bit and put it to some repo. Now I will play with the second unit and start doing something more productive :-)

Yes. Over the weekend I let it code bed clock with alarms done by sidplayer so today morning I was woken up by The Last Ninja 1 Tune 2 Palace Gardens. I did not write single line of code.

This tune was amazing :)
This past year was very strange. I was using deepseek from time to time, asking for help, it was nice. But a harness makes LLMs a different animal. Give DSH a test, it has no cli yet, but the web UI is excellent, and can build plugins for itself just by asking it to.

edit: I thought it was The Wastelands, the Palace Gardens is nice too :)

I'll try to clean it up a bit and put it to some repo.

It is up there at https://github.com/fanoush/SidClock including release builds. I checked the documentation and it looks pretty readable to me now (after few rounds of clarifications)

EDIT: some photos here https://ibb.co/album/9h6mJr

I thought it was The Wastelands, the Palace Gardens is nice too :)

All are great but I wanted something gentle for waking up, that one is :-)

still playing with this, some SIDs were not playing correctly (some last ninja effects, SIDs with samples) so I pointed it at the source of latest player with the library inside (now named cRSID not cSID-light) https://csdb.dk/release/?id=261057 and it took the source adapted it and now I have both new and old version linked in sharing the same RAM space. New one is integer only and run almost perfect wih ~25% CPU usage except Arkanoid which is very heavy with many samples, this did not run at realtime speed, more like 0.8. So I told it to optimize it and with some easy bits it also rewrote the ADSR emulation to be event driven and now Arkanoid plays fine even with some headroom. in every step it produced wav files and compared to be similar or bit exact, in the end it reverted some that would reduce quality an now it is bit exact to original source and faster. Then I let it add version for the FLPR coprocessor so all three versions are there sharing the same C64 emulation state in RAM. it plays fine but the risc-v version is slower so Arkanoid does not play at full speed again (so the M33 and/or the ARM compiler is simply better at same clock than the risc-v FLPR) , but it was great test anyway to get it working. Now I will go for version where FLPR would emulate just the SID chip by reading its SID memory registers in shared RAM while M33 will emulate rest of C64 and poke those SID registers, that could work better for heavy sids like arkanoid to have more cpu to M33 (which also does BLE and draws to screen) and maybe it will even allow higher precision of SID emulation. So overall I am having fun and I am still surprised how much it can do by itself without detailed instructions.