Running examples on nrf52840 dongle

[Obakeng]

Hi,

I tried to run the pca10056 ble_app_uart on a nrf52840 dongle (pca10059) after modifying the example as suggested here on the devzone. I had to define the rx,tx,ctx and rts pins since these are not defined in the board header file for the dongle. However, after these changes and compiling using the Makefile under the armgcc folder and programming the resulting hex and the softdevice using nrfconnect, it did not work.

Could you please advise as to further changes that are needed to get the example to work as well as how to get general pca10056 examples to work on pca10059 (nrf52 dongle). Please note that I do not have the DK and cannot get hold of one in the time period I need to get this to work.

Note: I have got the examples meant for pca10059 to work without modifications.

Thanks,

OB

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Can you elaborate on this statement:

programming the resulting hex and the softdevice using nrfconnect, it did not work.

Does it not work to program the application? Is the application not advertising? Is the data not coming over UART?

Which pins did you configure for UART peripheral? How did you connect UART to PC? Note that there is no Segger Debugger chip on the Dongle, meaning that there is no "automatic" UART to USB interface. If you want to use the USB interface for UART, you need to incorportae something like the USB CDC ACM Example into the application.

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Please make sure you follow all steps described in the nRF52840 Dongle Programming Tutorial. Did you connect the UART lines to anything? If you leave them floating, there might be an error detected on the lines, putting the device into the error handler. By default, most examples in our SDK that use app_uart pass the errors to APP_ERROR_CHECK in the UART event handler. If you are using app_uart, you can try to remove this macro, to see if the rest of your code continue executing.

[FrankBau]

Yes, the UART lines were floating. If I do an external loopback by connecting RX and TX lines, or pull RX high, it works. Thanks alot.