NRF52 BLE examples not working with gcc

[Mohammad Amin]

After working with NRF51822, I decided to go for NRF52832, and I bought some modules that have NRF52. I am using GCC and SDK13. I installed the S132 soft device which is in "sdk13\components\softdevice\s132\hex" using NRFGo. Then, I compiled and tested the blink example which is in "blinky\pca10040\s132", and it worked perfectly. However, none of BLE examples don't work at all. I tested many samples like "ble_peripheral\ble_app_beacon". However, the device doesn't advertise. I've done all the necessary things completely. Even the blinky example works, and I don't know why BLE examples are not working. Please, help me

This is the module that I am using

[Sigurd]

Hi,

Assuming that the board don't have a LFCLK crystal oscillator, you will need to use the LFCLK RC oscillator. For SDK 13 you can change this in ble_stack_init()

Code snippet:

static void ble_stack_init(void)
{
    ret_code_t err_code;

    nrf_clock_lf_cfg_t clock_lf_cfg = NRF_CLOCK_LFCLKSRC;
    clock_lf_cfg.source = NRF_CLOCK_LF_SRC_RC;
    clock_lf_cfg.rc_ctiv = 32;
    clock_lf_cfg.rc_temp_ctiv = 2;
        

    // Initialize the SoftDevice handler module.
    SOFTDEVICE_HANDLER_INIT(&clock_lf_cfg, NULL);
    .
    .
    .

[Sigurd]

It seems that the module has a crystal on it which can be seen in the photo. I don't know whether is it for LF or anything else

From the picture it looks like it only have a 32MHz HF crystal, not a LF 32 KHz crystal. The ble_app_beacon example will not output anything on the RTT by default. You will need to enable the nrf_log for that. I.e. set NRF_LOG_ENABLED to 1 , and set NRF_LOG_BACKEND_SERIAL_USES_UART to 0 and NRF_LOG_BACKEND_SERIAL_USES_RTT to 1, in sdk_config.h

Did you see any BLE activity with nRFConnect after the code change(to use RC oscillator) with the ble_app_beacon example?

For development I would recommend buying a nRF52-DK. The board also have a on-board Segger J-Link programmer/debugger.