Downloaded the SDK for the nRF52840 and found out that all refer to other hardware pca10040 and pca10056

[jean-marc]

Again!!! I have a lot of problems to navigate on the Nordic products.

I follow the links and went to the start52840dongle and downloaded the SDK.

I find only stuff regarding the pca10040 and pca10056, they must be kidding because the dongle is pca10059.

I would like to know which is the dongle SDK and where to find it.

I like to know what fw runs now on my Dongle if I need to reload it. I am mostly using Connect (which is very poor as compare to Master Control Panel). Or is Connect able to reflash my dongle?

How can we run Master Control Panel with this dongle nRF52840? My original Dongle pca10000 does not connect with MCS (as well as the nRF52840).

Thank you for some help.

jean-marc

[awneil]

jean-marc said:

I find only stuff regarding the pca10040 and pca10056

These are the Development boards - as the name suggests, it is expected that you will use a development board for developing on.

The development boards are a far more convenient platform for starting out and for development - not least because of the on-board J-Link.

I would strongly suggest that you use a Dev Board while you gain familiarity - and move on to the dongle later.

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

As awneil writes, the nRF52840 Dongle (pca10059) is not well suited as a development platform due to the lack of a debugger. That is the reason why only a few SDK examples have projects for it. You can run most examples on the nRF52840 Dongle, but you have to make some adjustments to the flash and RAM start address and size to make room for the MBR and bootloader (the simplest is to compare with another pca10059 project). If you are looking for a development platform for the nRF52840 you would be far better off with the nRF52840 DK, which has an onboard debugger (amongst other things). The intended purpose of the nRF52840 dongle is as a HW companion to the nRF Connect PC application.

Master Control Panel is legacy software which is no longer maintained, so it will never get support for the nRF52840 dongle.

[jean-marc]

Clear enough, thank you for the answer.

Now I ask Nordic, why would they send you to those links and to the "start here" if it is for another product or not suited for your product. I can understand that I need a DK, just say it and not let you download stuff you do not really need...

[awneil]

Well, the Product Page for the Dongle does say:

"The dongle has been designed to be used as a wireless HW device together with nRF Connect for Desktop. For other use cases please do note that there is no debug support on the Dongle, only support for programming the device and communicating through USB."

So there is no claim that it's intended for use as a development platform, and the "no debug support" is a strong hint that it's not ideal for that.

I guess they could explicitly state, "for development work, we suggest the DK". Maybe they assume that people with the necessary skills for such development should be able to work that out for themselves?

The "Click here to get started" does very much focus on the use case described - the SDK download is clearly marked as Optional.