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Choices for Flash programmer

Hi,

We are using NRF51 and STM32F0 on our custom board and one of our customer's requirement is the ability to program both of these MCUs in the factory. They would like us to ship them the .hex versions of the firmware for these MCUs (For NRF51822, We will also send them Softdevice hex file) and they should be able to use a windows system, connected with Segger J-Link ( NRF51822) and ST Link debugger (for STM32F0) and some sort of script (windows batch file or a script in a scripting language such as Python) to program these MCUs.

I'm currently exploring this area and I think that openocd could be used (It has a windows port) to achieve this requirement. However, I'm very new to this area and hence your suggestions and experience in this regard will be very helpful for me to take a decision.

Ideally, I would also like to replace the two programmers (Segger Jlink and ST programmer) by one (I have not used JTAG before, but could that be used ???) as well. This would make our customer's life a little easier.

Update:

  1. Apparently, JTAG interface cannot be used with STM32F0.
  2. Segger J-link can also be used to program STM32F0 MCU.
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  • Thank you @awneil. In past I used Jlink in interactive mode to program NRF51822 on Linux host. That worked like charm and as it also supports flashing STM32F0, Segger j-link looks like a good option, however after reading the License agreement with Segger, it seems that I cannot redistribute the software to our customer without prior written agreement with Segger. So, the customer will have to install this software by himself on it's machine or we have to get the written agreement with Segger. I think this may not be the case with openocd.

  • Clearly, you need to discuss Segger's licensing issues with Segger themselves.

    But, AIUI, when you buy a JLink that gives you a licence to use their software with it.

    NB: that's the JLink as a separate product - distinct from the JLink that's integrated on the Nordic boards...

  • Thanks again. I tried using jlink.exe for programming NRF51822 and STM32F0 MCU in non-interactive mode (by using a command line option, -CommandFile ) and it worked perfectly fine. Need to test flashing of Softdevice and bootloader as well with Jlink.exe. Probably, it will be straight forward as well.

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