How to recover bricked nRF52832 with ST Link?

RE: How to recover bricked nRF52832 with ST Link?

HITMAnsOFT — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:07:44 GMT

My SearchFu failed me I admit, but that thread is pretty convoluted. Now that I have the chip working, a known working HEX file and a JLink as a backup, I can attempt to put together a working OpenOCD for nRF52.

RE: How to recover bricked nRF52832 with ST Link?

endnode — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 09:42:54 GMT

There actually is patch for OpenOCD to perform nRF5x recover procedure as it is designed on top of generic ARM registers. See this thread (search in the forum is powerful tool, I hope we can close this Q&A then;).

RE: How to recover bricked nRF52832 with ST Link?

HITMAnsOFT — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 16:37:46 GMT

Update: The JLink connected to the board without problem. I ran "nrfjprog --recover". Now the OpenOCD sees the device, but I will not use it for development, because it seems unstable and may brick the board again. I'll use JLink while it is available, until I find a suitable OpenOCD version to work with nrf52. I'm leaving this question open because no fix through OpenOCD was found.

RE: How to recover bricked nRF52832 with ST Link?

HITMAnsOFT — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 05:52:56 GMT

Turbo J, thanks for the suggestion! I tried with the official Segger update, it says my ST-Link is not compatible. Was worth a try however, as Segger seems to squeeze more performance from the same STM32 chip than the ST themselves.

endnode, the main question here is whether it is possible to perform the recover/erase all procedure with ST-link. The wiring is very simple, but the OpenOCD version that supports nRF52 doesn't seem stable to me. I might hack myself a JLink from a small STM32F103 board later, as I found a working hex file somewhere online, but first I'll get a normal JLink from the office for a couple of days and check if it helps.

RE: How to recover bricked nRF52832 with ST Link?

endnode — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 16:07:35 GMT

But in general it's very unlikely you "bricked" the nRF5x and even less that you've burned it just by flashing Soft Device. Usual problems when you crawl this forum are: bad wiring/other HW problem or not using the latest flashing SW or "go with SEGGER J-Link OB on some nRF5x DK boards or with stand-alone SEGGER programmer and use latest Nordic tools to recover/erase all". Sorry for not being more specific but it's almost impossible to debug this kind of issue over the forum Q&A...

RE: How to recover bricked nRF52832 with ST Link?

Turbo J — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 15:47:33 GMT

IIRC some of those ST-Links can be reflashed to J-Links via a firmware update from SEGGER. Might be worth a try.