nRF51822 Development and Evaluation

[chandrashekar]

Hi,

I have a Development and Evaluation board by Waveshare and i have a nRF51822 board. I have downloaded the nRFgo studio and i have used a USB to UART board and connected it to the USB port. Now to use the nRF51822 board i need to flash the softdevice S130 and later flash the required Mesh protocol. Initially i connected in windows and i could not detect the board, so i tried in the Ubuntu platform there i was not able to detect the board.

Problems are

1. How do i power the nRF51822

2. How to flash the softdevice into the nRF51822 with the help of the Development and Evaluation board.

3. I need to do mesh network using the nRF51822 boards

I am really in need of help, i am stuck very deeply, please do help me

[tesc]

Hi,

I can only give general answers for the nRF51822 and nRF51822 based boards. For the details on how to power, program, etc. the nRF51822 on a particular board I refer to the documentation and support of the producer of that specific board, in this case Waveshare.

1. Powering the nRF51822 usually means powering the board. You may have to turn on a switch or something. Boards with USB connector can usually be powered over USB. Refer the documentation for your board.

2. If there is a programmer on the board (as it is with our nRF51 and nRF52 DKs and our nRF51 Dongle) then you just connect it over USB and use programmer software on the PC (such as nrfjprog, or from the IDE, etc.) Many third party boards do not have a programmer on the board, and so you would need an external J-Link programmer. For development you can use our DKs for external J-Link programmer. I do not know if the board from Waveshare has an on-board programmer or not.

3. nRF5 SDK for Mesh v2.x onwards doesn't support the nRF51 series. For Bluetooth Mesh projects I highly recommend getting nRF52 development kits.

Regards,
Terje

[chandrashekar]

Hi Terje

Thanks for the input, i was able to power up the board and turn on the bluetooth capabilities of the board.

Yes the waveshare board has a port to connect the J-link programmer to it, I did connect the board with the J-link programmer. I am using the nRFgo studio to program the nRF51822, I tried to push the softdevice S130 into the nRF51822 chip but the nRFgo studio is not able to detect the board. The nRF51xx link programming block in the nRFgo Studio is disabled, I even tried to add the board with the help device manager and board manger but was unsuccessful.

I have a doubt, does the setup support windows 10 or should i use windows XP

[chandrashekar]

Hi Bjorn

I am sorry it's not possible to use nRF52 series as it's not in my budget.

I'll give you a clarity on what I am doing, I have a waveshare's BLE development and evaluation board which has a nRF51822 board attached to it, I am able to establish the communication with the board via UART and also able to send and receive messages from the serial port utility application. 

My doubt is that I have an ARM debugger with its help I am able to debug the board but should I burn the S130 softdevice first or should I burn the mesh Hex file first. 

I have another doubt that should I use windows 7 or windows 10. Please do help with the Bluetooth mesh I am not able to move forward I have trusted nordic devices to develop low cost and low power module based BLE mesh  

[Bjørn Kvaale]

Is this the board you currently have? How much flash & RAM does your 51822 chip have? Is it the 256 kB flash & 32 kB of RAM version?

For debugging, I would recommend debugging via JLINK. This can be done either via the JLINK EDU if your project is not a commercial project or via a nrf51 or nrf52 dev kit (via the debug out port & an SWD cable).

I am not too familiar with the ARM debugger, but this might work. The Mesh SDK uses Segger RTT as default for logging, so you may need to figure out how to adapt the sdk to accept uart debugging instead. We have an sdk_coexist example in mesh sdk v2.1.1 which might be useful located at: nrf5_SDK_for_Mesh_v2.1.1_src\examples\sdk_coexist\ble_app_uart_coexist.

How are you planning on programming the board? Via nRF go Studio? This documentation could be helpful.

You can use either Windows 7 or Windows 10. Just want to reiterate that it is unfortunately not advised to use the nRF51 on the newest mesh sdk.

 

[chandrashekar]

Hi Bjorn 

I am using the board that you have mentioned and the nRF51822 chip contains 256 kB flash and 32 kB RAM version. 

I am using the ARM debugger and it's working fine with the setup as of now. I am able to detect the board and able to flash the LED blinking example.  

I am using the nRFgo studio to program the board and I am able to detect the board and program it using the studio. 

I have my last doubt that is, the nRF51822 chip does not support mesh protocol, right? I will make my teammates understand about the mesh implementation using the nRF51822 chipset. 

Regards

Chandrashekar

[Bjørn Kvaale]

Hi Chandrashekar,

The nRF 51822 chip is unfortunately not supported by the latest mesh sdk, as can be read in the readme documentation:

## Compatibility @anchor readme-compatibility

The mesh stack is compatible with the following configurations:

| SoC                                            | Board(s)  | SoftDevice(s)       |
| ---------------------------------------------- | --------- | ------------------- |
| nRF51422_xxAC (deprecated)                     | PCA10028  | S130 v2.0.1         |
| nRF52810_xxAA<sup><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>  | PCA10040e | S112 v6.0.0         |
| nRF52832_xxAA                                  | PCA10040  | S132 v5.0.0/v6.0.0  |
| nRF52840_xxAA                                  | PCA10056  | S140 v6.0.0         |

The mesh stack is also compatible with the nRF52810 platform, but not supported by this version of the nRF5 SDK for Mesh.
Support for the nRF51 Series platform is being dropped, but building the examples<sup><a href="#fn:2">2</a></sup>
is still supported using
the CMake build system.

Kind Regards,
Bjørn

[chandrashekar]

Hi Bjorn 

Thanks, Bjorn it's helpful in understanding the nRF51822 boards and the mesh protocol. We are now trying to port softdevice 8.1 and some mesh examples that we found on Github. I'll let you know once I am successful in setting up the mesh if possible