Flash NRF52 by UART

[Flavien]

Hi everyone,

I would like to create my board like this one :

www.adafruit.com/.../3406

learn.adafruit.com/.../39913

I know that Adafruit changed the bootloader in them NRF52, so I would like to know if I can flash my nrf52 by UART without change the bootloader ??

Thx for reading,

Best regard,

Flavien

[endnode]

Hi, there is no bootloader on nRF5x chips, it natively supports only JTAG/SWD. So whatever you want to support on top of it you need to a) write it/load it and b) make it coexisting with other FW components you want to load later (like radio stack, APP etc.) If you take nRF5 SDK there is example bootloader from Nordic which supports wired UART. If you don't like that then you need to write yours or try to google (e.g. on GitHub).

[Flavien]

Hi endnode and thank very much for your answer.

I would like to program my nrf52 with Arduino IDE and a bridge USB - UART. Do you know if that will works without bootloader ??

Sorry I am a beginner with bootloader.

Flavien

[endnode]

As I said: NO, this will only work if you have Arduino compatible bootloader pre-loaded. To be honest I don't see single advantage of using this set-up when you can simply use SWD through any nRF5x Dev Kit or other kind of programmer like SEGGER J-Link or STlink... it might have only one advantage: UART is better choice if you bootload the chip from another embedded system (because implementing SWD is bigger effort then UART). But that isn't your case I suppose.

[Flavien]

I havn't too much place on my board, so I would like combine the USB port and the programmer port.

[endnode]

Well you don't need anything else then two PINs (+ GND and VDD of course) to do SWD... but as you wish. Good luck with Arduino SDK;)