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.

[Hung Bui]

I don't think we have any check if it's Nordic board or not. If you can communicate with the board via UART then you should be able to use the MEFW firmware. Could you please tell the UART pins you used ? I am not 100% sure but most likely we used hardware flow control so 4 pins needed. have you connected P0.30 to ground ?