In past, I was able to perform DFU-OTA over BLE transport for a custom board that has nRF51822QFAA (256kB main flash memory) SOC. I tested this functionality with Nordic's Android APP, nRF Toolbox and nRF MCP. Since then, I've been working with a different MCU for a different application and today I'm revisiting this topic. During the last few months, our custom board has gone through significant changes and hence I'll be once again trying to implement DFU-OTA over BLE for the same old nrf51822QFAA SOC on our new custom board. I noticed that there is a newer version of SDK (v10.0.0) and a newer version of Softdevice (s110, v8.0.0) available and as in general, staying at latest software is better, hence I'm wondering what are things that I should take into consideration while trying to migrate my application from SDK v6.1.0 with SD V7.0.1 to SDK v10.0.0 with softdevice v8.0.0 ?
According to the migration notes (s110_nrf51_8.0.0_releasenotes),
This SoftDevice version is not Production tested on all IC revisions, and is not compatible with nRF51 IC/revision 1.
Q1 : How to find the IC version of my nRF51 IC?
According to the SDK Release notes, v 10.0.0, there are some known issues with DFU-OTA which are:
- Device Manager is not supported in multi-role S130 operation.
- Device Manager works in peripheral or central only operation on
S130. This must be decided at compile time.
- The DFU over BLE example has been tested to work with a minimum
connection interval of 11.25 ms. The application cannot handle
connection intervals lower than 11.25 ms and may undergo a system
reset in the middle of a firmware update.
Workaround: If you face unexpected disconnects during the firmware
update process, consider increasing the connection
interval used by the master.
- The old manual procedure for testing buttonless DFU, as specified in
the documentation, can lead to the DFU process hanging or returning
an error when used with Master Control Panel 3.8 and newer.
- Bootloader binaries (.bin files) generated with the GCC makefile
should not be used. Instead, generate the bootloader bin files using
nrfutils, found on GitHub.
According to the same SDK Release notes: The supported Softdevices for SDK v10.0.0 are:
- S110 v8.0.0 - S120 v2.1.0 - S130 v1.0.0 - S210 v5.0.0 - S310 v3.0.0
Q2: The MCP App version that I've installed on my Android Phone is v4.0.4, and my custom board does not have a button (So basically I need to test buttonless DFU), So does this mean, I should NOT migrate to softdevice s110, v8.0.0 ?
Q3: Since SDK V10.0.0 is not supported with SoftDevice v7.1.0 (see above for the list of supported Softdevices), hence I cannot use SDK V10.0.0 with SD s110, v7.1.0 ?
Please confirm.
