HID Keyboard Sample App on iOS 10.2 not working

[DamienF]

Hello,

Has anyone been able to succesfully use the HID Keyboard Demo (ble_sdk_app_hids_keyboard_main from Nordic nRF51822 SDK ver 6_1_0 along with GCC compiler for s110 softdevice, xxaa variant, and PCA10003 target board) on iPhone 6 runing iOS 10.2?

I'm using a RedBearLabs BLE NANO dev board that has the nRF51822 SoC chip on it.

After a power-cycle the dev board pairs right up and everytime to the phone (after a one-time initial pairing of course), however NO key get transmitted (key transmission is triggered by a GPIO, that we've confirmed is properly configured).

As far as data transmission to iOS 10.2 other samples apps work as advertized e.g. the HRS Profile/Service, however in our experiment we absolutely need the HID Profile/Service.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Damien.

[Petter Myhre]

What do you mean by "NO key get transmitted"? What kind of key are you talking about? Could you elaborate?

[DamienF]

Hi Petter. Yes, I meant key presses. I'm currently using Notes (iOS's default text app) as my receiving application... this is where I was expecting the "hello" string to show up.

[Petter Myhre]

I see. I thought you were talking about passkey pairing or something. I have tested with SDK 6.1.0. I see the same behavior as you. Can I ask why you are using such an old SDK? If you use for example SDK 10.0.0 it should work fine.

[DamienF]

Alright, we got it to work using SDK 10.0.0. Thanks! In addition we're now trying to use the local UART of the nRF51822 SoC chip as a debug port. We can make it work using the demo code in examples\peripheral\uart so we ported that code over to the examples\ble_peripheral\ble_app_hids_keyboard demo app. No compilation error however no TX data gets transmitted over the UART; it seems like the uart code might use resources already preempted by the hid demo code. Are we doing this correctly? Is there a better way to achieve run time debugging?

[Petter Myhre]

Have you done what I suggest in my answer here?