Can I use master control panel with a non offical usb dongle board ?

[Mustafa]

I have an after market breakout board for nrf51822 with a usb-to-serial chip (cp2102) that I bought from Amazon. It should act as an NRF51 USB dongle (pca10031-like) but with half the price.

I managed to flash the MEFW on it successfully using nrfgo studio and the official nrf51dk debug out feature, but I wasn't able to use MCP with it. It keeps saying: No response from master emulator

I've tried different versions of MEFW with different baud rates. but nothing worked

Note: that breakout board doen't have segger J-Link debugger chip, will that be a problem in it being detected and used by MCP. from my understanding it should not be a problem.

[Hung Bui]

@Mustafa: It nRFMCP should work with any board that have correct UART pins. Which pins on the nRF51 on the board was used for UART RX and TX pins ?

Were them match with what on the nRF51 dongle board (e.g PCA10031)?

Note that we have a small trick that we mount P0.30 to ground to tell the chip that it's the newer dongle (not the very old one we made 3 4 years ago). So you may need to mount the pin to ground also.

[Mustafa]

I managed to get a breakout of nRF51822 and an FTDI USB serial board with flow control, I did as you told me;

P0.30 to GND, and the UART connections you mentioned in your comments, however, it didn't work ( MCP didn't find master emulator).

What am I missing here?

note: I am using raytac 3rd party nrf51822 ble board and i have access to all pins.

update: my unofficial board doesn't contain the external 32.768khz crystal that is in the pca10000/10031 dongle, is this the reason it didn't work?