Problems when powering down the device during provisioning

RE: Problems when powering down the device during provisioning

ste2108 — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 08:16:23 GMT

Dear Hung Bui,

Sorry for the late answer. In the end we realized that the problem was due to a sneaky interaction between the defrag task and one of our routines checking wether a specific flash area is corrupted. When this routine is activate in the middle of the defrag procedure (which temporarily moves data from one flash area to another) it found the wrong data in that flash portion and reset the whole flash space. Adding a check on active defrag fixed the problem.

Thank you for your help!

Regards,

Stefano

RE: Problems when powering down the device during provisioning

Hung Bui — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 08:38:50 GMT

Hi Stefano,

Could you let us know which exact Mesh SDK version you are using on the board ?
What we know is that we did have some bug fixes regarding the flash manager module in SDK v4.2.0.

So if you are using earlier version than that you can try to upgrade to v4.2.0 (still uses nRF5 SDK v16.0.0).

If that not possible, please try to step in the code and let us know at exact which line of code you see the issue.

RE: Problems when powering down the device during provisioning

Hung Bui — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 14:53:58 GMT

Hi Stefano,

I have forwarded your question to our Mesh team. I will get back to you when I have more information.

RE: Problems when powering down the device during provisioning

ste2108 — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 14:14:03 GMT

Dear Hung Bui,

Thank you for your quick answer. Yes, we traced back our problem to an assert during the flash initialization after the power cut and yes, a workaround was added to make up for the problem by cleaning up the flash pages used by the mesh. But is there a way to prevent this from happening? Is there any possibility that the problem could affect the application flash space? That would be a real disaster for us.
Thank you.
Kind regards,

Stefano

RE: Problems when powering down the device during provisioning

Hung Bui — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 12:39:24 GMT

Hi Stefano,

Could you provide any debug information you have, for example if you have any log ? Or if you have managed to step into the code and check which line causing the crash ?
I am suspecting something with the flash module that cause the problem. The mesh module in nRF5 SDK is quite sensitive with flash issue that if the module couldn't read the flash database it will not just reinitialize the flash, it instead will throw an assert.

Have you deployed your devices or it's still in the development phase ? Do you have any DFU option . If we can find what causing the assert we can add a workaround, for example to reinitialize the flash if the provisioning was not successful.