How to flash softdevice s130 and SDK 11 on smart beacon kit

[Revo]

Hi all, i am trying to start using the smart beacon kit nRF51822, but searching around i am a bit confused on how to flash the most recent softdevice with sdk on it; i followed the guide on this link: devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../

But this says how to load some old softdevices, and i am not really sure if i can do exactly the same thing with the new, in particular what hexes to use. In addition, this guide says to compile an example that gives me 12 errors in keil, just opening it and compiling as said in the guide, so i must use the precompiled hex (unexplainable). Thanks really in advance.

[Stefan Birnir Sverrisson]

Hi Revo

Sorry for the very late response.

When using BLE, you must use both softdevice and an application that matches with that particular softdevice. The compatibility of nRF51, different softdevices and SDKs is listed in the nRF51 compatibility matrix. To see what revision of the nRF51 your beacon kit has, look at the beacon kit page on infocenter

For example if you have becon kit 1.3.0, it apparently has third revision nRF51 on board. To run SDK 11 BLE example on the beacon kit, you first flash the s130_nrf51_2.0.0_softdevice.hex file, then you flash any BLE application from SDK 11.0.0, e.g. the \nRF5_SDK_11.0.0_89a8197\examples\ble_peripheral\ble_app_beacon\hex\ble_app_beacon_s130_pca20006.hex, which should work out of the box.

As you can see in the table on the beacon page, Beacon firmware 1.1.1 is only compatible with S110 7.1.0/7.3.0 softdevice, so beacon firmware 1.1.1 does not work out of the box with more recent softdevices.

If you are getting errors when compiling the Beacon firmware 1.1.1, that is not as expected. Are you sure you have the toolchain updated as recommended in the blog post? If using Keil, you should be compiling the \nRF51822 Beacon v1.1.1\Source Code\nrf51_beacon\ble_app_beacon\pca20006\s110\arm\ble_app_beacon_s110_pca20006.uvprojx. What errors are you seeing?

[Revo]

Thanks but i figured out to have the beacon rev 1, so i can't flash them, i will use the old ones! Thanks however!