BLE Central UART example for PCA10059 (nRF52840-dongle)

[Steven Grunza]

Will there be an example of the Nordic UART Service in the central role for the PCA10059 (nRF52840-dongle)?  If so is there any timeline on release?

[Nguyen Hoan Hoang]

You can use the one for the PCA10056.  Just remap the UART pins.  

[Steven Grunza]

Except the idea is to use the BLE radio and the USB CDC interface, not the UART.  On the PCA10059 the UART does not connect to the USB bus.

[Steven Grunza]

I am on EWARM 8.30.1.17148 but I am not using Options->Debugger->Images the settings.  Once the soft device is downloaded it shouldn't need to be downloaded again unless the nRF52 gets chip erased.  There is an option in EWARM to download a file that I generally use although it seems that might be broken now. {Project} {Download} {Download File ...} is what I have used in the past but it seems to have had a problem this time around.

Restart after a breakpoint is hit or miss: the Monitor Mode debugging at least works some of the time.

[hmolesworth]

Ah, I see .. the Erase and Download File only seem to work on our version with Debugger->Download-> Use Flash Loader unchecked; we don't have any .d or .out Softdevice files, only the issued .hex files and are reluctant to use our own conversion although I suppose we could. We can also uncheck the extra hex file option after the first session, which speeds up things. Now that your comments focus my mind, I realise that not using the flash loader works much better all round, no idea why ..

[Steven Grunza]

Although the EWARM file open dialog box is looking for Debug files (*.d*,*.out) there is a All Files (*.*) option and it used to work for the released Soft Device hex files.  Not sure about now.

[Rob Philip]

Hey there.. Did you ever achieve success with this project. I am beginning the process of doing exactly what you've described. nRF52840 dongle connecting as a CDC device to a PC and over BLE to another nordic device using the BLE UART interface.

Any hints you might have (or even example code) would be most welcome! 

[Nguyen Hoan Hoang]

There are UART central example and CDC example in th SDK but are 2 examples.  You need make a new project to combine them.