In this Tech Talk session, Mark Hallam and David Seymour, Field Applications Engineers (FAE) for Silicon Labs, provided useful tips and tricks that they’ve collected from fellow FAEs and real Simplicity Studio users. Click here to watch the complete webinar and register now for future Tech Talks. Here are some key points from Mark and David’s session.

We Put the Simplicity in Simplicity Studio

It is the tool that has it all – Simplicity Studio integrates all the tools and resources you need for your MCU and wireless projects in one place. You will get not only an eclipse-based IDE with wireless stack support but also comprehensive documentation with demos and software examples. Simplicity Studio also comes with advanced tools that can help you with your development like Energy Profiler, Network Analyzer, AppBuilder, and Hardware Configurator.

We Have the Complete Solution to Enable your Bluetooth Products

Silicon Labs development solutions help enable your Bluetooth products, including:

• industry-leading Bluetooth 5.1 and 5.2 SoCs and pre-certified modules
• in-house developed stacks with latest Bluetooth 5.2 and mesh features
• reference applications and source code for iOS and Android
• free-of-charge development and protocol analysis tools to boost productivity

To put it simply, as an integral part of these solutions, Simplicity Studio is a collection of tools, applications, utilities, and documentation that can save you a lot of development and debugging time, provide efficient support for your projects, and allows your products to meet the stringent design, features, power, and performance levels that you want to provide your own product users.

Useful Tips when Using Simplicity Studio

• Always sign in to gain access to resources on the silabs.com web site.
• Disable automatic updates that occur every time Simplicity Studio opens or set Update schedule to once a week.
• Enable viewing “heap status” in the Simplicity Studio bar.
• Disable SDKs not being used to improve Simplicity Studio performance.
• Enable “Show line numbers” in source code.
• Enable folding of #if/#ifdef’s and if/else, do/while, for, and switch statements in source code.
• Disable “Targets” not used. If not using specific build tools, disable them.
• Increase the heap used by Simplicity Studio to increase performance.
• Keep workspaces for a specific project and/or SDK version to help keep the size of workspace smaller and to allow zippier Simplicity Studio operations.
• Disable the debugger auto-build option.
• Get hold of useful paths and links to Windows 10 paths, Mac paths, documentation links, and other useful links like Software Developer Docs.

Start your Wireless product development with BG22 SoCs. Register to join our Hands-on Virtual Bluetooth Workshop to get help with the development of your secure IoT device on a Thunderboard kit.

Q&A

The Tech Talk ended with a Q&A session, and you can find the transcript here.

This week, we were excited to announce that our new EFR32xG22 (xG22) family officially hit the market. This new class of ultra-low-power and secure wireless solutions is optimized for a wide range of battery-powered or energy harvesting IoT applications. Based on an Arm Cortex M-33, xG22 solutions provide best-in-class device security, energy efficiency and RF performance to enable next-generation, high-volume connected products. For all the necessary tools to develop high-volume, scalable wireless IoT applications, check out our xG22 Wireless Starter Kit which supports Bluetooth, Zigbee and Proprietary wireless protocols.

If you’re interested in developing Bluetooth applications, we have an additional resource for you. Mohammad Afaneh at Novel Bits recently published a great guide for getting started with the new BG22 development kit. “With the increased demand for securing embedded devices, especially those with wireless connectivity capabilities…[BG22] provides an attractive platform for developing your next generation BLE product,” Afaneh said. Novel Bits is a leading resource for developers looking to learn more about BLE. In addition to the technical blog and tutorials, Novel Bits offers a Bluetooth Developer Academy to help you take BLE expertise to the next level.

To learn more, check out the NovelBits BG22 Getting Started Guide.