Nordic launches DevAcademy to accelerate the wireless IoT learning journey

Nordic Semiconductor has launched DevAcademy, its interactive online learning platform. The new platform aims to accelerate the wireless IoT learning journey and equip developers with the technical information and know-how they need to build tomorrow’s leading wireless products using Nordic solutions.

DevAcademy is for developers, makers, students, or anyone interested in learning the latest and best in IoT and wireless technologies. 

Comprehensive courses

DevAcademy courses are designed to embrace all skill levels. Each course has a well-defined curriculum and is divided into individual easy-to-follow training lessons that cover both technical theory and hands-on exercises in one place. Users also get to test their knowledge through interactive quizzes. Users completing all course steps will receive a Certificate of Completion that can be downloaded or shared on social media. 

Nordic’s courses are continuously improved and kept up to date. They will help participants reduce time-to-market by teaching them all about the latest technologies from Nordic and development best practices. Throughout a course, participants can provide feedback through the “Feedback” button available on each page. In addition, there is an end-of-course survey, where participants can talk about courses, lessons, or exercises that they would like to see in the future on DevAcademy. Nordic takes users’ valuable feedback to continuously improve the content of its courses and to plan future courses. There are currently two courses publicly available on DevAcademy, with more courses to be made available soon. 

The ‘nRF Connect SDK Fundamentals’ course teaches how to develop rich portable RTOS-based applications to power future-proof IoT products. The course focuses on learning the essentials of firmware development using the highly extensible and feature-rich nRF Connect SDK (Software Development Kit). The nRF Connect SDK contains a highly configurable real-time operating system called the Zephyr RTOS and a wide range of samples, application protocols, wireless stacks, libraries, and hardware drivers.

The hands-on exercises in this course teach step-by-step how to develop portable RTOS-based applications that can run on Nordic’s nRF52, nRF53, or nRF91 Series IoT solutions. In addition, users will gain substantial practical experience in interfacing with common peripherals/system blocks and external sensors. By the end of this course, users will have gained a solid understanding of nRF Connect SDK, its structure and content, as well as the confidence to apply this knowledge to projects. 

The ‘Cellular IoT Fundamentals’ course focuses on learning the essentials of cellular IoT firmware development using nRF Connect SDK. This course covers the cellular technologies LTE-M and NB-IoT, with users examining in-depth the software architecture of cellular IoT firmware, as well as the nRF91 Series hardware. 

The hands-on exercises in this course will teach step-by-step how to configure the nRF9160 SiP to establish a cellular link using different technology configurations and connect to the Cloud through various communication protocols like raw UDP/TCP sockets, CoAP, and MQTT – in addition to using the GNSS receiver inside the nRF9160 SiP to obtain geographic coordinates in different schemes. 

By the end of this course, users will have learned how to develop firmware for cellular IoT prototypes based on the Nordic Thingy:91 cellular IoT prototyping platform or the nRF9160 DK.

Accelerated learning

“DevAcademy will strive to accelerate learning through carefully designed curriculum-based courses with well-defined learning paths,” says Petter Myhre, Product Marketing Director at Nordic Semiconductor. 

“The free, self-paced online courses, which can be taken at any time and from anywhere, offer a smooth technology onboarding experience with everything needed to get up and running provided in one place.”

Developers can accelerate their wireless IoT learning journey by signing up at academy.nordicsemi.com

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