Any special steps for first use - n52832

[MattFL]

Is there anything special required to make a n52832 work the very first time the chip is programmed? Fuses to set, etc?

I'm new to nordic chips and I was handed a board with a working chip, I program it and it works fine. I was handed a new board, same design and same chip, and using the same code the chip programs fine but does not run, and draws no current. The low frequency clock crystal (32kHz) is not oscillating and since both pins of the crystal connect to the processor (XL1, XL2 pins) I'm trying to determine if it's due to a hardware problem, or a step that I missed programming the chip for its first use. I'm just flashing code to it using a Segger through uVision IDE.

[MartinBL]

What kind of software are you trying to program?

If you are making a BLE application a common mistake is to forget to program the Softdevice before you program the application. If you forget this, your application won't run at all and you won't see any blinking LEDs or anything that would indicate that your device is somewhat working.

A trick is to try e.g. the Blinky Example in our SDK. That example doesn't need a BLE stack and should work regardless of the state of your external clocks.

Neither the LF nor the HF external crystal will start oscillating if you don't explicitly start them in software. There is an internal HF RC oscillator that will drive your CPU. The external HF crystal is generally only used when you are using the radio or require an accurate clock (because the external HF crystal draws more current than the internal RC oscillator).

If none of this helps, I would suggest that you start looking for HW issues and maybe test a third device if you can.

[MattFL]

Thanks for the reply. The original board (that works) was handed to me with the soft device already installed. I'm using toolkit 12.2.0 which I'm sure is what the previous guy was using, and I'm told the softdevice is version 3.0.0 and that's what I flashed onto the new board. But I'm starting to suspect that it might have been a different version on the original board. Can I query the soft device that is currently on the working board for its version? The other thing I'm going to try shortly is read all of the memory off of the working board and flash it to the new board. If that doesn't work then I think it's definitely a hardware issue. I haven't tried sniffing the uart lines yet, it throws the error during the uart initialization.