DFU over the air upgrades

[Jerry Easley]

I want to add a service to my application that will, over the air, download and reprogram the flash on a nRF52480_dongle.  I have spent hours reading various snippets of documentation I suspect much of it is out of date and the bits that seemed current didn't mak a lick of sense to me.

I want to do something like this:

Write a bluetooth program on my PC  that will broadcast firmware images to one or more nRF52840_dongles.

Add a service to a nRF52840 application that will accept the broadcasted firmware and reprogram the flash on the nRF52480_dpngle..

I do not want to use a "soft device", what ever that is.

Regards,

Jerry

[Priyanka]

Hi Jerry,

Have you taken a look at the Adding DFU support guide? You can try to use mcumgr on your PC to do the DFU.

But do note that The mcumgr command-line tool only works with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) on Linux and macOS. On Windows there is no support for Device Firmware Upgrade over BLE yet.

Best Regards,

Priyanka

[Jerry Easley]

Hi Priyanka,

I apologize for my tardy reply; we had a holiday here and I had some hardware issues I had to attend to.

I think what you have recommend above is exactly what I am looking for! Thank you so much!

Regards,

Jerry

[Jerry Easley]

I tried to follow the instructions in the article you provided, but, soon became confused. The author instructs you to make a few modifications to the main.c file.  In particular inustructs me to insert a couple of lines right before "

• Lastly, add these lines right before bt_conn_cb_register "

This does not exist in the sample shipped with the SDK,  Apparently he is referencing a sample on github. Shoud I clone the gethub sample and work on that?

At the end he confusingly says:

"If you've followed the above steps correctly, the sample should look like this: https://github.com/simon-iversen/sdk-nrf/tree/ble_dfu_peripheral_lbs/samples/bluetooth/peripheral_lbs "

But that seems to be the very project he instructs us to modify????

I think I should clone the project from github and the make the modifications to that; is that correct?

Regards,

Jerry

[Jerry Easley]

I cloned the sdk_nrf from github and indeed it contains the sample I want.  However i can't figure out how to tell SDK_CoONNeCT_Extensions where to load the application template from. It won't even load it if I type in the complete path and file file name.  Why does Nordic make even this most simple of tasks so incredibly difficult?

Regards,

Jerry

[Jerry Easley]

I gave up trying to supply the project as a template and just copied the project into my workspace and opened it up under nRF_CONNECT_EXTENSION.  I then added a build configuration for a nRF52840Dongle.  When I attempted a build on the unmodified project, it ended in error;

"c:\Nordic\MyApps\dfu_peripheral_lbs\src\main.c:11:10: fatal error: sys/printk.h: No such file or directory
11 | #include <sys/printk.h>
| ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated."

Apparently, the sample from github is not compatible with the nRF_CONNECT_EXTENSION environment.

I am dead in the water and await your assistance.

Regards,

Jerry

[Jerry Easley]

Maybe it would be more productive to code a test application from whole cloth; can you direct me to a discussion of the necessary API calls as well as a discussion on its "operational" theory.  I fear the

Add DFU support to your application

is is just another rabbit hole and I will never be able to make work.

Regards,

Jerry

[Jerry Easley]

On further reflection, the article seems to based on an outdated SDK which explains the build error.  However, the sample shipped with version 2.4.0 of the sdk does not contain the landmarks mentioned in the article.

When I build the unmodified sample from the sdk, I get a plethora of error messages:

These errors not withstanding, it does build and seems to work.

Regards,

Jerry

[Priyanka]

Hi Jerry,

Apologies for the delay. We are short staffed here owing to the summer holidays here in Norway. Yes, the article seems to be based on a previous version SDK. Were you able to get it working or do you have any further queries regarding the topic?

-Priyanka

[Jerry Easley]

Hi Priyanka,

No I don't know how to proceed, everything I have tried has failed.

Regards,

Jerry