Building and flashing on separate machines

[ace.johnny]

I have access to a Linux machine for command-line Zephyr development which works perfectly, but I lack user permissions to flash my nRF5340 Audio DK and unfortunately cannot modify the environment.

I also have access to a Windows machine that has the SEGGER J-Link software pack (7.92m) installed, but no Nordic software or SDK. The Audio DK, however, conveniently enumerates as a flash drive under Windows, and SEGGER suggests that I can drag-and-drop precompiled binaries to it for programming.

Can I use this technique to flash a simple single-core Zephyr sample .HEX binary to my Audio DK? Or perhaps use one of the other Windows J-Link apps, such as J-Flash Lite, to accomplish the same without installing additional Nordic software?

[Elfving]

Hello,

I rarely use this functionality my self, but yes you should be able to flash the DK by simply drag-and-drop'ing a hex file.

You can't use just any sample hex though, it would have to be built for the right SoC. It might be that you can get something working if you flash a hex built for another 53 board, but I don't think a single-core sample would work in any way. We do not have a lot of pre-built .hex files for specific boards available in the SDK, but you can simply build everything in in the Linux machine and bring the files over to the Windows machine when you want to flash them. 

Let me know if there is anything else.

Regards,

Elfving

[ace.johnny]

I was unable to flash my Audio DK using drag-and-drop on Windows 10, however the J-Flash Lite application successfully programmed my device without issue.

I can now build Zephyr's basic samples targeting nrf5340_audio_dk_nrf5340_cpuapp on the Linux development machine, and then flash the DK on Windows using the compiled .HEX files.

I'm not sure why drag-and-drop didn't work, but J-Flash Lite is appropriately simple for evaluation purposes. Thanks for your prompt and helpful suggestions.

[Elfving]

ace.johnny said:

I was unable to flash my Audio DK using drag-and-drop on Windows 10

Ah my mistake, I just found out that we've dropped that functionality on our newest set of boards. Considering that drag-and-dropping isn't the main way we want people to program we didn't consider this to be a great loss. 

I am glad you found a way to program that works for you.

Let me know if there is anything else.

Regards,

Elfving

[ace.johnny]

That's all I needed to get started. Thanks again for your help. You can close this ticket.