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No valid bidirectional (UART) communication between the iMX6 UL-S evk board running the Nordic PC BLE driver and the nRF52 DK running the Nordic connectivity 132 uart software

Hallo,

Currently I'm investigating different Low Energy Bluetooth solutions for our healtcare products that we build in Televic Healthcare.

So  here is the setup I have build to verify how fast and easy we can integrate the Nordic products into our healthcare products:

As we want still  to have our own board running the application software the Exceet IMX6 UL-S 2 evk board is used (see : https://docs.exceet-electronics.de/board-imxceet-ul-2-s/) in combination with the Nordic nRF52 DK board.

Both boards are linked together via a UART connection for bidirectional communication. 

As proposed by Nordic to handle this kind of use case I have been investigating the serialize concept as described in the Nordic v15 SDK documentation.

So the Exceet board will operate as application board and the Nordic nRF52 DK board shall operate as connectivity board 

However for fast proof of concept and evaluation I found the wonderful and powerful BLE driver SW provided by Nordic distributed via GIT.

So I managed to build (cross compiling for Cortex 7A processor) and run the BLE driver SW on the Exceet IMX6 board.

As mentioned both boards are connected via a UART link. 

On the Nordic board that operates as connectivity board I flashed the connectivity_2.0.1_115k2_with_s132_5.0.hex (downloaded from GIT)

Unfortunately the BLE driver application on the application board exits after trying to send 6 times the LINK CTRL packet or better the SYNC message : 01 7e

The UART message as it was trapped by a logical analyzer. 

Debug output:

Any ideas how to proceed further, what  further debug information can be interesting for Nordic?

I also tried to use the HR connectivity SW as provided by the latest Nordic SDK v15 for debugging via the SEGGER IDE debugger.

In that case I flashed the latest SoftDevice SW and flased the HR connectivity applic SW after it was build in the SEGGER IDE. 

BTW I have also posted some comments on the github site for the BLE driver project:

https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/pc-ble-driver/issues/143

Thanks in advance,

Best regards,

Frank Vieren

Parents
  • Update:

    ----------

    It seems the GPIO pins P 23/24/25 an 02 are not by default enabled to be used as UART when running the connectivity applic from the github project PC BLE driver, correct?

    Correctly to say that when running the connectivity HR applic from the SDK these pins become active when doing the serialization setup between 2 Nordic DK's with one acting as connectivity board and the other one as application board. Because this was the first test I did before using the Exceet board as application board.

    What to make this work, as the sources from the Git hub project for the connectivity applic are not available?

    Thanks,

    Best regards,

    Frank

Reply
  • Update:

    ----------

    It seems the GPIO pins P 23/24/25 an 02 are not by default enabled to be used as UART when running the connectivity applic from the github project PC BLE driver, correct?

    Correctly to say that when running the connectivity HR applic from the SDK these pins become active when doing the serialization setup between 2 Nordic DK's with one acting as connectivity board and the other one as application board. Because this was the first test I did before using the Exceet board as application board.

    What to make this work, as the sources from the Git hub project for the connectivity applic are not available?

    Thanks,

    Best regards,

    Frank

Children
  • Hi all,

    I had a better look at the Nordic BLE connectivity applic supporting UART and it seems a number of UART settings must be adapted to make this work together with PC BLE driver applic running on my Exceet application board.

    - parity must be excluded, as the Exceet board implements no parity in the BLE driver SW

    - the baudrate must be adapted from 1000000 to 115200

    - not quite sure about the HWC but probably it must be kept enabled.

    The GPIO pins are set correctly as far as I can see.

    I will do the necessary changes and keep the Dev zone informed on my progress.

    Best regards,

    Frank

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