So I bought a "social retail" beacon device that claims to have 300foot range. After getting it I realized it uses the "iBeacon" standard, which is not compatible with my Android phone/apps. I took the board and and saw it has a nRF51822 chip with markings:
n51822 QFABCO 1517EK
Looking at the board and the nRF51822 datasheet, I see there was a SWD programming header that I could utilize. I bought a st-link/v2 programmer and flashed the pca20006 "beacon eval board" softdevice, boot loader and app to the chip (all 3 hex files). That didn't enable the nRF app to see the beacon.
I then went searching around here in the questions and on the nordic site and I noticed there are several different "pca"/pcb versions of the beacon app. This made me think there are different firmware versions for different board configs. So I inspected the PCB I bought and compared it to the "beacon kit pca20006" schematic and PCB. Social retail seems to have copied the PCB reference design exactly, as the LEDs and switches are wired to the same pins of the pca20006 ref design has. From what I can tell, the PCB version should not matter if I don't care about the switch and LED features. There was minimal components required to make this chip work: antenna/balun, 16Mhz crystal, and some de-caps
I use OpenOCD and Adalink to flash the board. I have confidence that is working, as I can read out the chip status:
Hardware ID : 0x007B SD Version : S110 7.1.0 Device Addr : E3:84:21:DD:F0:88 Device ID : 197D556C188F1DCC
I tried an experiment and flashed just the s110 8.0.0 hex file to the chip and was able to see the SD version changed as I expected. I flashed the 7.1.0 version back and saw the version change, so that's another data point that flashing is working properly.
Is there some other subtle thing I have missed that's blocking this from being visible to my nordic app?
FWIW: I want to use this "social retail" beacon because it has a "f" PCB antenna that I'm thinking should have a better range than the beacon (pca20006) has. I have a pca20006 board as well, so I know the nordic app on my phone works just fine with it.
