Funny you should ask that question…I did this morning!
Looks like my Black Friday buy from RAK has come in early - I ordered as standard Aliexpress del’y but looks like our friends have kindly shipped as 7-10day DHL 
3 x Rak Pilots + 2 x beefier external Ant’s
With 2 other self builds that should keep me busy through to and beyond Xmas 
With an ic880a? 
I still have a gateway on my workbench connected with Dupont wires waiting for an enclosure…
But this one is a #fail, I took the measure on the wrong place… 
oeps… 
waiting for my ordered dremel kit, the aluminium from this1590BB ‘stomp’ box is harder then I thought.
but it’ll make the cheapest ruggedised mobile enclosure
Has anyone experience with Nordic nRF52: nRF52832 / nRF52840 ?
The nRF52832 is a Bluetooth 5.0 SoC built around an ARM Cortex-M4F CPU with floating point unit, running at 64 MHz, has 512 kB flash and 64 kB RAM, I2C, I2S, SPI. The nRF52840 has 1 MB flash, 256 kB RAM (and supports multiple protocols, including Zigbee).
I was hoping nRF52832 may be used as general purpose MCU as alternative for ‘Arduino’ AVR or as a cheaper alternative for SAMD, possibly in combination with LoRa.
(There appears to be an Arduino Core for nRF52832 but I have not had a look at it.)
I bought two of these E73-2G4M04S1B modules (€2.69 each) here to give it a try.
Does anyone know a breakout board to make these breadboard friendly?
nRF52832. 832 and not 328
The SDK and the documentation from Nordic are very very good. The MCU is easy to put in sleep mode (just one line !) where it consumes ~1.2uA with RTC enabled. The 32 GPIO are configurable on any peripheral (I2C, SPI, UART…). That’s my favorite MCU.
For those who loves arduino, the drawback is the use of makefile and command line. But everything is provided with SDK. There is a nRF5 project for Arduino IDE: https://github.com/sandeepmistry/arduino-nRF5.
Typo’s corrected (ATmega328 was probably in my muscle memory). 
For nRF52840 dongle support I found: GitHub - Redferne/arduino-nRF5: Arduino Core for Nordic Semiconductor nRF5 based boards
What tools/framework are you using, nRF52 SDK + mbed + Segger Embedded Studio?
I’m using only the SDK. You have to install gcc-earm and nrf-command-line-tools (for nrfjprog, which flash the firmware through SWD).
Then I use makefile provided in SDK (in each example, you have a pca10040/armgcc/Makefile). And vim, of course. That’s it
I didn’t try mbed nor Segger embedded studio.
Thanks.
Do you think that can work for the nRF52840 dongle as well?
(The nRF52840 dongle is programmed via USB and has no debugging support.)
I didn’t try the nRF52840 yet. But my understanding is that the nrfjprog manage also the flashing through USB. So, yes !
Thanks for the link. 
I have looked at STM32 before but only from an Arduino framework perspective, which unfortunately is not (well) supported by STM. The Blue pill is nice but there is not much hardware diversity in this type of boards with consistent Arduino framework support (several different Arduino cores exist and most are not further developed/maintained. The newer ‘official’ one maintained by fpstm is still under development). Also the Blue pill is not exactly targeted at low-power with it’s AMS1117 voltage regulator.
learning ADAFRUIT’s excellent CircuitPython
if you can get blink working everything is fine 
(reminding you I am a mech engineer, not a programmer) I am belting out lots of stuff in “organic” Micropython at the moment using ESP8266 and ESP32, self teaching to program in Python. To be honest I find it a challenge to get motivated to use Arduino IDE already. So much easier to use modules, classes etc. Python is just so much easier to read and write (for somebody of my talent - read: or lack of talent!) and then you have -help() built in everywhere! For somebody not biased by years of more “boiler-plate” type code in any environment I can see why the trend towards Python is as it is.
I am hoping I will be able to write CircuitPython as easily as I can read it as it looks like it may be the “Arduino IDE” of the Python ecosystem in future, especially with the file structure on the M0’s etc.
@BoRRoZ: You getting used to using REPL >>> to check that your dev boards are alive and working on the fly, not boot-looping, have network etc, etc. Luxuries we didn’t have before…
how many will I use ? 
trying to build an TTN - MQTT clientdisplay with ePaper and RPI 3 - model A
unboxing day ? 
happy that the membrane ‘sticker’ keypads arrived.
handy if you don’t have room inside your enclosure to fit a normal non latched switch.
and much cheaper too
well … it’s working and I’m positively supprised by the switch quality ( a real 'click)
after all… it was a big investment
The AliExpress Advent Calendar…
In November order cheap things on AliExpress and in December, get everyday some random stuff in your postbox!
Today’s delivery: DC-DC Step Down Power Supply Modules!
I’m waiting for the mailgirl right now (5 inch HDMI 
) … see her almost everyday, its like your birthday, you never know what’s in the package
the only disadvantage is that I’m working on 5 projects at the same time, waiting for parts
another thing is, that while I’m still working on ‘version one’ I get ideas and order parts for version 2.
knowing that it will take a month… but sometimes you receive the parts very fast and then it’s difficult to not start immediate on version 2… well, lets say, luxury problems
(I needed a slightly bigger enclosure to fit a bigger display and a GPS)
