Can I restrict "nrfjprog -i" from showing all connected devices on Linux?

[san_gr]

Background info

I have 10 nRF52840-dk boards connected to a single Ubuntu machine (via usb) and have set-up 10 user accounts. The intention is, each user account to be able to access and program only one of those 10 boards.

I have set-up udev rules so that based on the serial number of the connected board, it will add it to a different group (called nrf01, nrf02 ... nrf10) and set the mode to read/write for user and group only (mode=0660). Also, each user account is also added to one of those groups.

# for all nrf52840 boards
ATTRS{idVendor}=="1366", ENV{ID_MM_DEVICE_IGNORE}="1", ENV{ID_MM_PORT_IGNORE}="1"

# per board
ATTRS{idVendor}=="1366", ATTRS{serial}=="000123456789", ACTION=="add", GROUP="nrf01", MODE="0660"
ATTRS{idVendor}=="1366", ATTRS{serial}=="000234567890", ACTION=="add", GROUP="nrf02", MODE="0660"
# etc

What works

With this set-up, I can indeed program only one device from each account, provided I give the correct SN to nrfjrpog, eg "nrfjprog -f nrf52 --program blah.hex -s xxxxxxxx", and if I try to program one of the other connected devices, I get a "can't connect" type of error. Which is exactly what I want

What doesn't work (and need your help)

If though, it seems that I can only program 1 device per user account, when I do "nrfjprog -i" or "nrfjprog --deviceversion" I get all 10 connected devices! And also if I try to program a device without providing a serial number, it fails. I'm assuming because it tries to program the first board it sees, and of course due to the udev rules it cannot write to it.

So my question is, how do I need to set-up my udev rules so that "nrfjprog -i" only shows one single board per user account?

[Sigurd Hellesvik]

Hi,

That is an interesting use-case.

What will the users do with the devices? Will they use nrfjprog directly, or will they for example use west for programming?
I am asking to figure out what options we have here.

Regards,
Sigurd Hellesvik

[san_gr]

Hi,
They are using nrfjprog directly for both programming and resetting the device.

[Sigurd Hellesvik]

I do not think that nrfjprog has a way only to list available devices, no. And since nrfjprog is not open source, we can not mod it to be so, either.

If this is a usability-issue, then maybe the following can work for you?
Use Udev SYMLINK to make devices appear at ttyUSER1, ttyUSER2, etc. Then use "nrfjprog --com" to see which device is yours.

Alternativley if you want to make it magic and simple:

alias nrfjprog="nrfjprog --snr 683304854"

Then do that for each user.

[san_gr]

Thank you for your answer.

I have already done the symlink as you suggested and had instructed the users to always use --snr xxx.
I'm not going to make an alias for each user but I will suggest that they do themselves