Flash Sparkfun board with Nordic SDK tools in Visual Studio

[gwalton]

I have a SparkFun Pro nRF52840 Mini that I am trying to flash with a simple Hello World program. I have the SDK setup in Visual Studios, created the custom board configuration for the mini, and the application built correctly. However I cannot see the board on Connected Devices after plugging it into my PC. 

I saw somewhere else on this forum something about the SDK only registering Nordic development kits. If this is true how would I go about using the SDK to flash this board? Do you have to use a Nordic development kit that can be seen by the SDK to then flash it?

I am planning to eventually spin this off into a custom PCB and I would love to keep the pipeline the same.

Also I apologize if I am missing anything obvious I am a software guy just learning hardware.

Thanks!

[Elfving]

Hello, and welcome to Nordic semiconductor and our products in case you are not already familiar with us.

I saw somewhere else on this forum something about the SDK only registering Nordic development kits. If this is true how would I go about using the SDK to flash this board? Do you have to use a Nordic development kit that can be seen by the SDK to then flash it?

No not quite, it only registers debuggers. You generally need one of those to debug and flash any other board. You can for instance use an expensive JLink Commander as a debugger, or just use the onboard Jlink debugger chip that we have (and people generally have) on their Development Kits - which is why a DK is the recommended starting point. Note that you can also use a DK as an external debugger, to debug and program a separate board, like for instance the SparkFun Pro nRF52840 Mini.

I am not too familiar with the SparkFun Pro nRF52840 Mini, but what some other smaller boards typically rely on (like our Thingys and dongles), is a trick where they essentially flash the board using a Device Firmware Upgrade (DFU). This relies on the board already having a bootloader pre-programmed that would allow it to do this. After a quick search here it seems that counts for the Sparkfun board as well. Though unfortunately this means that you won't be able to detect the board on the Connected Devices list in VSC, as what is really being detected there are programmers/debuggers. 

There are a few ways of flashing it using DFU, but what seems to be the most straight forward is to first manually find the resulting zephyr.hex file that you've built, then get the board in DFU mode, which would make it show up as a MSD, then drag and drop the zephyr.hex file into the folder.

Also I apologize if I am missing anything obvious I am a software guy just learning hardware.

No worries! All questions are allowed here. A great starting point for learning about our nRF Connect SDK is the DevAcademy courses. I recommend having a look at those, starting with the NCS fundamentals course.

Regards, and keep the questions coming!

Elfving