RE: nRF51422 QFAAE0 SDK available?

David Smoot — Sun, 26 Jan 2014 04:42:56 GMT

So a coworker much smarter than me solved the problem and it was an easy fix once he explained.

The problem was that the size of the soft device was bigger than the GCC linker scripts state in SDK 5.1. So if you use GCC like I do, when you try to write a program with a soft device present it will try to load it at a protected address and fail. So it turns out to be a painfully simple fix to get GCC to load at the proper addresses.

Note that this is not thoroughly tested, but it went from not loading code at all with a soft device present using GCC to successfully loading and running the Ant broadcast TX example. I am not a Nordic employee so I might be doing something wrong here. Use at your own risk but this worked for me.

To enable the S210 soft device with GCC on the nrf51422 on SDK 5.1 with QFAAE0 silicon: Edit the file gcc_nrf51_s210_xxaa.ld under nrf51422/Source/templates/gcc. Original file lines 7 and 8:

  FLASH (rx) : ORIGIN = 0x0000A000, LENGTH = 216K
  RAM (rwx) : ORIGIN = 0x20000800, LENGTH = 14K

Modified file lines 7 and 8:

  FLASH (rx) : ORIGIN = 0x0000C000, LENGTH = 208K
  RAM (rwx) : ORIGIN = 0x20000900, LENGTH = 13K

It is a simple fix in hindsight but I could not see it. Thankfully I have a very smart coworker that solves my problems.