Unable to upload to custom nRF51 board

[DMS]

Hello,

I have been developing firmware on a custom nRF51 board. 

Upon testing firmware that involved BLE advertising,scanning, UART communication over BLE and FDS, i observed that uploading resulted in the following error from nRFgo studio-

For clarification, in each upload step i followed the following steps-

1)erase the current flash storage

2)upload soft device

3)upload the hex file of the built uVision5 project

I am using SDK11 and softdevice 130 with the custom nRF51 board.

I have tested this code even on the nRF52 development board, where it uploaded/worked as expected.

I had already tested the pre-FDS implementation of my code earlier on this board, so when i commented certain parts of the FDS code (the R/W parts) I was able to upload to the board. I also observed that the size of the built hex file without FDS R/W was 51KB and the size with R/W was 63KB

Could it be that my hex file+softdevice exceeds the total flash storage capacity of the board?

I found out from my supervisor that the total flash storage of the device was 256KB, but observed that softdevice 130 itself was 298KB, since uploading worked with 298+51KB I'm guessing either some compression occurs or the total flash storage on the custom board is higher than I was told.

Any solutions to this issue would be appreciated. 

Thank you.

[Håkon Alseth]

Hi,

 

Could it be that my hex file+softdevice exceeds the total flash storage capacity of the board?

If you have loaded the incorrect softdevice version, or used the one aimed for nRF52832, your application is likely to overlap with the softdevice area.

First, press the "Erase All" button in nRFgo Studio, then be sure you load the s130 v2 (Select "Program SoftDevice" tab in nRFgo Studio), then the application (Select the "Program Application" tab).

I found out from my supervisor that the total flash storage of the device was 256KB, but observed that softdevice 130 itself was 298KB, since uploading worked with 298+51KB I'm guessing either some compression occurs or the total flash storage on the custom board is higher than I was told.

A .hex file includes overhead compared to a pure binary .bin file. 298kB .hex file will not be equal to a 298 kB binary file.

 

Best regards,

Håkon

[DMS]

>If you have loaded the incorrect softdevice version, or used the one aimed for nRF52832, your application is likely to overlap with the softdevice area.

I am using the softdevice s130 v2.0.0 that comes with SDK11.0, this has worked in the past for all of my uploads

>First, press the "Erase All" button in nRFgo Studio, then be sure you load the s130 v2 (Select "Program SoftDevice" tab in nRFgo Studio), then the application (Select the "Program Application" tab).

I also followed the same steps during the upload process, which results in the error message i posted earlier.

I tried tweaking the IROM settings under target options to deal with potential softdevice overlap.

It was originally-

After referring to this i set it to-

But even this did not fix my issue.

Any other potential solutions to my problem would be appreciated.

Thank you.