RE: DFU BLE .zip Packet Generation Issues

Andy Cruz — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 20:35:56 GMT

Hey, sorry for responding so late, a lot of deadlines were just around the corner when I originally asked these questions and now I have more time to go back and respond in detail. With help from my supervisor we were able to get the buttonless BLE OTA DFU working to upload programs to our NRF52 development kit. In response to your reply:

1. That blog post unfortunately takes me to this error page so I can't say if the intended page would have been helpful or not. My supervisor and I did however go over the Nordic Info Center page for Buttonless DFU ver. 14.2.0 again more in depth and at the end managed to get it functioning correctly.

2. The .zip file was definitely far too big and we found the main reason being the target files I was zipping were not the correct files to use. I was trying to essentially recreate the exact same example .zip files in the folder "C:\nRF5_SDK_14.2.0_17b948a\examples\dfu\secure_dfu_test_images\ble\nrf52832" by using nrfutil to package the .hex files in there. The fix for this was we created our own DFU buttonless App files following the guidelines on the InfoCenter for 14.2.0 Buttonless DFU App for creating our own application. We used Segger Embedded Studio to edit the given example found in "C:\nRF5_SDK_14.2.0_17b948a\examples\ble_peripheral\ble_app_buttonless_dfu\pca10040\s132\ses" (after making a copy in case we broke something) to compile the code and create .hex files of our own that are significantly smaller sizes than the example images. The resulting .zip files from our experimenting included .bin files closer to 70KB rather than the previous 300+KB from zipping the example image apps, which are much more in line with the file sizes of about 40KB found in the DFU test image .zip files.

3 & 4. Neither am I, the computer I use runs many programs slowly and did since the day I arrived so all I know is this issue is not a problem with anything related to nrfutil. It runs much more quickly on other computers, completing tasks in a short time always.

Thank you very much for your reply, following the corresponding InfoCenter pages more closely helped us since it was the skipping ahead and trying to zip up the DFU test images to test nrfutil packaging that was the error.

RE: DFU BLE .zip Packet Generation Issues

Bjørn Kvaale — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 16:11:26 GMT

1) This blog post should also be helpful. The Nordic Infocenter is also very helpful, especially the info on buttonless dfu.

2) The zip file seems way too big. What exact command are you using to generate this zip file? In general, after --application-version, you want to just try 0 first if this is the first DFU you are doing with that application (i.e. --application-version 0). Have you tried following the blog post I mention in answer 1? What is the zip size if you follow that guide?

3) Not sure why this is the case.

4) My nrfutil commands do not take that long to complete. Are you running nrfutil on Windows? Do all the nrfutil commands take that long to run? I ran nrfutil --help & that finished in about one second. I am running version 3.4.0 on windows 10.