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flashing binary onto nRF52840 USB dongle via Raspberry Pi 4

So, I have compiled blinky for the USB dongle52840, but am having difficulty getting west or the development toolchain to flash the dongle. Any help would be appteciated. I would be happy to share the recipe for developing zephyr from a raspberry pi, if I get it fully running.

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drollinger 4 months ago +2 verified

I have completed my project: Zephyr development environment on RPI 4 running Bookworm, compile binary and flash nRF52840 dongle. Here is a pdf describing the process.
drollinger 4 months ago in reply to Susheel Nuguru +1

Thank you, the dependencies in debian always seems to be an issue. I will give it a go and get back to this post.

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0 Susheel Nuguru 4 months ago

Sorry for the late reply. Abhijith is away and could not reply to this thread. I will try to look into this.

The crash seems to happen because nrfutil 5.2 is a Python 2-only release (dict.iteritems()), so running it inside your Zephyr Python 3.13 venv will always fail.

Try setting up the dedicated nrfutil venv/pipx install and confirm nrfutil --version shows ≥6, after that re-run west flash --runner nrfutil; verify the LED blinks. if that works, capture the commands for the Raspberry Pi recipe you plan to share. I do not have any experience working with the Pi itself, but I think solving this issue with the tool version conflict should take you a bit further
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0 Susheel Nuguru 4 months ago

Sorry for the late reply. Abhijith is away and could not reply to this thread. I will try to look into this.

The crash seems to happen because nrfutil 5.2 is a Python 2-only release (dict.iteritems()), so running it inside your Zephyr Python 3.13 venv will always fail.

Try setting up the dedicated nrfutil venv/pipx install and confirm nrfutil --version shows ≥6, after that re-run west flash --runner nrfutil; verify the LED blinks. if that works, capture the commands for the Raspberry Pi recipe you plan to share. I do not have any experience working with the Pi itself, but I think solving this issue with the tool version conflict should take you a bit further
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0 drollinger 4 months ago in reply to Susheel Nuguru

Thank you, the dependencies in debian always seems to be an issue. I will give it a go and get back to this post.
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0 Susheel Nuguru 4 months ago in reply to drollinger

Great .. will keep this thread in waiting until then.
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0 drollinger 4 months ago in reply to Susheel Nuguru

Okay, 5.2 runs on Python 2 only, what is the latest nrfutil and what Python version does it run on?
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0 drollinger 4 months ago in reply to drollinger

Okay, The nRF52840 runs a bootloader requiring depricated commands. The RPI 4 running os bookworm can indeed run the nrfutil v8.11 from this location: https://files.nordicsemi.com/ui/native/swtools/external/nrfutil/executables/aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu/

The nrfutil v8.11 communicated with the nrf52840 usb dongle plugged into the RPI listed earlier, but the firmware on the usb dongle requires depricated commands, the depricated commands is the issue. I will attempt to reprogram the nRF52840 usb dongle with an updated bootloader over SWD compatible with the nrfutil v8.11.
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0 drollinger 4 months ago in reply to drollinger

So, MCUboot loaded onto the nRF52840 with SWD seems dead in the water and the nrfutil v8.11 can not communicate with it.
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