I'm the co-founder and CEO of Memfault. We were in the W19 YC batch. I never thought our news would make the front page of HN!
This is a very exciting day for us (after a very intense few months). We've known the Nordic team for years and could not think of a better partner to grow our platform.
Parsing the stock exchange notice [1], the three founders seem to have received 42 Million USD. If they had the same amount of shares, they received around 14 Million each.
> The three founders of Memfault - CEO Francois Baldassari, CTO Chris Coleman and VP Developer Experience Tyler Hoffman – will reinvest 30% of their share sale proceeds in Nordic Semiconductor shares, totalling approximately USD 13 million.
Nordic makes some good products. When I was doing hardware design for a product that uses a battery my options for power profiling were either not to do it or spend some eye watering amount of money. Then I discovered Nordic makes the PPKII, a cost effective, highly accurate profiler with quite good software. I detect good things in store for the company just based on the quality of stuff they have been putting out.
The TinyCurrent or uCurrent can be used for this as well when paired with a scope with scpi. However, the ranges aren't dynamic which is annoying if you're using something a WiFi part where you're going from uA to 200mA.
and godawful software. the SDK for their NRF52/3/4 is pure madness, i haven't even managed to set up the toolchain, documentation always out of date.
They used to have another toolchain for the older parts, but good luck setting it up now.
I spent so much time trying to get the SDK working for NRF52 that I genuinely just gave up and redesigned our whole product to use an ESP32 instead of the NRF plus other uC.
I think that is genuinely the reason espressif is eating everyone's lunch. All the old players in the IC business have such inexcusably bad SDKs that the acceptably designed and documented ESP-IDF framework just makes the most sense to use. Why would I spend six weeks fighting with Nordic SDKs with their weird system-wide installation when ESP-IDF can be set up in five minutes isolated to your user directory?
Seriously, it takes longer to find the correct Nordic SDK installer than it does to git clone, idf.py install, ./export.sh
And Nordic's weird documentation web portal is just egregiously bad. Espressif puts it in a static HTML page with a selector for the framework version. It's simple, elegant, and fast.
I did like using the NRF52 once it was finally behaving, but the ESP is just so easy.
I'm sorry you've had a bad experience but I don't agree, I prefer it to the ST, TI and definitely the Microchip tooling. It's CLI first, like the Espressif and Pico tooling which is a big plus for some and not for others.
Also, no mandatory login walls for toolchains and datasheets gets them a lot of goodwill in my book.
Segger Embedded Studio is a complete solution. One installer. You might need to pick an older version to go with an old SDK version, but its very straightforward.
Looks like it switches different ranges. ST makes something similar that has similar dynamic range without switching. They use analog circuitry (op amps and junk) to compensate for the resistor drop, so the path is uninterrupted. I've had systems where the auto-ranging on a bench meter is enough to cause it to reset. I can't find a schematic for the PPKII (haven't looked too hard though) but if it's actually switching the supply, that can cause issues to devices downstream. Especially if that switching causes a voltage drop change.
It switches the detection range, but not the actual power supply. You can ramp from <5 uA up to 500 mA and back all you want. I haven't noticed any glitching on the actual supply.
I have the ST one (X-NUCLEO-LPM01A), but its range is actually not enough for something like an ESP32, it goes into "overload" as the max current is 50mA for dynamic (100kHz bandwith) and 200mA for "static" measurements.
I'm working with NRF5 SDK. Most of its source is available (no idea if it's free software or not, but sources are there). The most glaring exception is softdevice - that's BLE implementation, it's huge binary blob, taking control over most CPU.
Their newer SDK based on Zephyr RTOS, I didn't work with it, but I think it's mostly open source as well.
It's all on Github (https://github.com/nordicsemiconductor), but it is not technically open source as it is a modified BSD that does not let you use the SDKs with other chipsets.
I have been developing firmware for Nordic chips for about 5 years now, and I have roughly the same amount of experience with Memfault.
The idea of Memfault is like Datadog for IoT stuff. The reality of Memfault is that everyone just uses it to push OTA firmware upgrades through the cloud, and capture stack traces on crashes. Sometimes you bolt on their metrics later, but 95% of the value is in OTA firmware upgrades and crash reports.
Nordic has started to assemble a juggernaut of a tech stack, and a collossal moat. They keep most of their Zephyr contributions outside the main source tree, in something they call the nRF Connect SDK. They've been developing vendor-specific extensions to Memfault's SDK for years.
The upside with Nordic is you get a complete embedded tech stack out of the box. The downside is that, if their stack doesn't doesn't offer what you need, you have to grapple with the incomprehensibly complex SDK in the entire industry. For some companies, it works great. For others, it's an attractive nuisance.
I don't know how much actually changes for either company with this acquisition. It probably isn't good news if you're ST, Infineon, or Microchip.
This is great news. We are implementing memfault, probably in September/October period, but were struggling with the pricing model for long-term growth.
I'm assuming Nordic gives the company the support and reach their mission and discover a more workable business model.
> Throughout the product lifecycle, continuous software upgrades strengthen the security, performance, power consumption, and functionality of products in the field.
This doesn't feel right to me. Back in the day when I started in embedded systems you would have to get it right before you shipped it. That had it's own problems of course, but at least you knew where you stood and if something worked well it would continue to work well until the hardware died.
Also I think the right word grammatically is continual not continuous. I suspect they changed it because continual software upgrades sounds terrifying.
Moved to nordic nRF52840 based system (RAK) because of the 9mA average draw to run Meshtastic for LoRa radio at 900mhz. Longest link so far from flat land is about 40 miles. Moving up the mountain to see what improved line of site can do.
Nordic chip is super impressive and power efficient compared to ESP32
Readit News
This is a very exciting day for us (after a very intense few months). We've known the Nordic team for years and could not think of a better partner to grow our platform.
Happy to answer questions, if you have them.
> The three founders of Memfault - CEO Francois Baldassari, CTO Chris Coleman and VP Developer Experience Tyler Hoffman – will reinvest 30% of their share sale proceeds in Nordic Semiconductor shares, totalling approximately USD 13 million.
[1] https://newsweb.oslobors.no/message/649971
https://n-fuse.co/devices/tinyCurrent-precision-low-Current-...
There's an unofficial Python library as well. I have power consumption tests running as part of my automated firmware test suite.
and godawful software. the SDK for their NRF52/3/4 is pure madness, i haven't even managed to set up the toolchain, documentation always out of date. They used to have another toolchain for the older parts, but good luck setting it up now.
I think that is genuinely the reason espressif is eating everyone's lunch. All the old players in the IC business have such inexcusably bad SDKs that the acceptably designed and documented ESP-IDF framework just makes the most sense to use. Why would I spend six weeks fighting with Nordic SDKs with their weird system-wide installation when ESP-IDF can be set up in five minutes isolated to your user directory?
Seriously, it takes longer to find the correct Nordic SDK installer than it does to git clone, idf.py install, ./export.sh
And Nordic's weird documentation web portal is just egregiously bad. Espressif puts it in a static HTML page with a selector for the framework version. It's simple, elegant, and fast.
I did like using the NRF52 once it was finally behaving, but the ESP is just so easy.
Also, no mandatory login walls for toolchains and datasheets gets them a lot of goodwill in my book.
Schematics: https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Development-hardware/Pow...
Looks like the PPKII can do up to 1A.
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Their newer SDK based on Zephyr RTOS, I didn't work with it, but I think it's mostly open source as well.
Strong agree with all those comments - it’s a great little tool at a great price!
The idea of Memfault is like Datadog for IoT stuff. The reality of Memfault is that everyone just uses it to push OTA firmware upgrades through the cloud, and capture stack traces on crashes. Sometimes you bolt on their metrics later, but 95% of the value is in OTA firmware upgrades and crash reports.
Nordic has started to assemble a juggernaut of a tech stack, and a collossal moat. They keep most of their Zephyr contributions outside the main source tree, in something they call the nRF Connect SDK. They've been developing vendor-specific extensions to Memfault's SDK for years.
The upside with Nordic is you get a complete embedded tech stack out of the box. The downside is that, if their stack doesn't doesn't offer what you need, you have to grapple with the incomprehensibly complex SDK in the entire industry. For some companies, it works great. For others, it's an attractive nuisance.
I don't know how much actually changes for either company with this acquisition. It probably isn't good news if you're ST, Infineon, or Microchip.
I'm assuming Nordic gives the company the support and reach their mission and discover a more workable business model.
This doesn't feel right to me. Back in the day when I started in embedded systems you would have to get it right before you shipped it. That had it's own problems of course, but at least you knew where you stood and if something worked well it would continue to work well until the hardware died.
Also I think the right word grammatically is continual not continuous. I suspect they changed it because continual software upgrades sounds terrifying.
Nordic chip is super impressive and power efficient compared to ESP32