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  • Case ID: 103126
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Segger on nrf51822 evaluation kit stopped working after firmware update

Erik Sanchez

Help please! I've been using the nrf51822-EK for several months. Everything has been working well.

I updated my SDK in order to be compatible with S110-SD-v6. Everything was still working. For some reason I decided to download and update nRF51-tools-v6 which updated my j-link driver to v4.86a. When I tried to flash a project, I got a prompt to update my Segger firmware. After letting the tool do this I can no longer connect via Keil or via nRFgo Studio or command line nrfjprog.

The EK will initially show up in the nRFgo Studio's list but when I click on it, the LED next to the Segger (on the eval PCB) goes out and I get an error.

image description

Here is the error: image description

Here is the screen after: image description

I can re-flash the firmware using the Segger J-Link Configurator but it doesn't help. image description

It doesn't matter which Nordic tool, or Keil I'm using, as soon as I attempt to connect to the device, the light goes out and I get an error.

I've attempted to use the nrfjprog --recover option but, again, the light goes out and nothing happens. I've also attempted to install various versions of the j-link software and firmware but it did not help.

Also worth noting, I have several of the evaluation kits. I've "bricked" 3 of them this way. I have a few more that are still somewhat working but I'm having some strange behavior with breakpoints.

Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated! I've spent the entire day trying to recover from this problem.

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    Second Edit: I believe this is the same issue that others encountered while putting the processor into power-off mode too quickly. I added a fixed delay of 50ms to my apps and have not encounteerd the problem since.

    Edit: After further testing, I'm not sure what the problem is or if I really fixed it. After leaving the device connected overnight I came back to the same problem. I used the newer nrfjprog --recover as was able to get the device back up and running with the newer tools. One thing I did notice is that with this version of software/firmware the nrfjprog --recover behaves a little differently. You can see the Segger LED flashing on/off while it's running. The previous configuration did not do that for me. It still took several runs of nrfjprog for it to work.

    It seems like there are some timing related issues at work here. My code puts the board into shutdown very quickly if there is no whitelist available for directed advertising. Perhaps this is causing the symptoms I'm seeing?

    I think I've recovered from this problem. Here are the steps that I took in case it helps anyone else out there.

    I use Parallels on a Mac so I reverted to my VM snapshot that I took before upgrading my toolchain. I had an older nRFgo Studio installation that and Segger tools v4.78g.

    I re-flashed my EK to firmware 4.78g using the Configurator to "replace" existing firmware since it was newer than the current tool.

    I used nrfjprog --recover to recover the EK the board. This seems like the key step here. I tried various firmware versions with various nRFgo Studio versions yesterday but nothing worked. Also of note is that on 2 of the 3 boards that I recovered this way I needed to run this step several times for it to work. On the first board it worked first shot. On the second board, it took around 5 tries. On the third board it took around 20 tries.

    I then re-installed the new nRFgo studio version 1.17.0 Win64 so that I could program the SD110-v7 softdevice. When I used this version of nRFgo with the EK with v4.78g it prompted me to upgrade firmware. I let it do so. After the firmware program was complete nRFgo studio crashed. This happened for every board. I restarted nRFgo and was able to program the v7 of the softdevice.

    Everything seems to be back in order. The only thing that I haven't done is re-install nRF51-Tools since I don't seem to need them? It seems like current versions of the tools came along with version 1.17.0 of nRFgo Studio.

    Since I don't entirely understand what's going on here there may be some unnecessary steps but the procedure got me out of a jamb. Hope this can help someone else.

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