Production of nRF51822 Devices

[Anne]

Hello all,

I have a few questions about the best way to go about mass producing nRF51822-based devices.

1. Can anyone recommend a manufacturer that possesses the appropriate equipment to mass-program the chip? This thread kind of makes it sound like we might need to build our own rig.

2. Is there any recommended best-practise for production testing Bluetooth devices?

Thanks for your feedback :)

[thomas]

Hi

I found a tips to do this. I'm using the Segger flasher arm with jflash software

First, get one fonctional board :

• Flash a board with soft device and bootloader (nrfgo studio)

• Program the chip via DFU with master control panel.

Then, Read back all the chip with jFlash and use the binary for mass production

[John]

The act of programming and then reading out a chip are not necessary. Nordic provides a mergehex utility that can be used to combine all 3 builds (soft device, app, and bootloader) into a single hex file that can be used for production. If you add the mergehex commands as a post build step you can even automate creation of a combined hex file for production.

[thomas]

Yes but are you sure bootloader recognize a valid app and boot directly on ? Because it's the problem. Generaly, with a merge hex and direct programming, device stay in the bootloader because he does not detect a valid app.I think it's just a flag asserted during the first dfu. The first time, app isn't flash via DFU so flag is not asserted. I think it's possible to modify bootloader but i didn't have time to find this flag....

[Anne]

Yeah, I was wondering about that too. Regardless, my question at this point isn't "how to I generate a production binary" it's "who can program a large number of nRF58122 devices for me?". Thanks for your answer anyway, though, I'm sure it will come in handy when I'm making the binary ^^

[Asbjørn]

There are companies that are able to supply you with programming a large number of chips. Some of our customers do this before they mount the chips on the PCB, while most of them actually do the programming in circuit. Alternatively is that you do it yourself by either using the Segger flasher tool mention earlier or for example a gang programmer from Elnec.

I would recommend you to contact your distributor or Nordic sales personnel in your region as they may have more specific recommendation based on what's available in you area. If you don't know who's you Nordic sales representative, then send me a PM here with your location and I'll patch you through.