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I've been looking a various replacements for the Bluegiga BLE112 and BLE113 modules I've been using so far for all projects involving BLE. Not that there is anything wrong with them, but they are a bit expensive.

So right now, I'm looking at the Nordic Semiconductor nRF51822 chip. It's got a couple of things going for it:

• It is pretty cheap
• It only requires relatively few support components
• The free version of the Keil IDE can be used for most projects. And this is important since the Keil µVision IDE costs about $4000
• The free, online mbed.org IDE can be used
• There's lots of documentation and many people are using it

I bought the nRF51 Development Kit (which has an onboard programmer) then I remembered I had a bunch of Minew D15 iBeacons lying around (From Alibaba). And since they are populated with nRF51822's, I figured I'd try to see if I could them flashed with my own firmware. (Spoiler alert: I could.)
Here's a short writeup of what I did.

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