I recently bought a particle argon board and feel very strongly about using Zephyr RTOS with nRFConnect extension on VSCode to develop and flash the board? So far, under connected devices, the argon does not appear at all and I am unable to flash. Do I require extra hardware (particle debugger? or JLink?) in order to flash Zephyr onto it? Further, if I want to debug the board with Zephyr and VSCode what hardware do I need? I appreciate any assistance as I've done a lot of research and it sadly seems I can't even flash my current argon with Zephyr, thank you.
Yes, you’ll need to replace the DeviceOS bootloader with an SWD programmer. A cheap DAPlink from Amazon should do the trick.
Keep in mind that DeviceOS is an RTOS, and without it, you cannot access the Particle Cloud/use it with Particle at all. DeviceOS provides you with threads, a HAL, and manages connectivity for you.
The NRF will need to be configured to use the ESP32 to access WiFi etc.
I see, thank you! Will I need a custom bootloader for the argon? Or with just an SWD programmer can I overwrite the entire device by flashing a Zephyr OS hex?
I'm not 100% certain what Zephyr requires - so it's best to enquire on their forums. I'm afraid we can only assist with DeviceOS and related questions.
I would suggest giving DeviceOS a go before you make the jump however. It really does work well.
There are much cheaper HW alternatives if Zephyr is a must.
The closest reference would be the instructions we provided to install Circuitpython on the Xenon when Mesh was deprecated: