NRF51 DK doesn't work with apps that use the softdevice

[myNrfDoesntWork]

I have a NRF51 DK board, and can't get it to do anything with BLE (probably including any of the examples that require a softdevice) but I ran the blinky examples just fine.

I started off using the SES Segger embedded IDE as recommended on the nordic website, but ran into the fact that all the example code for the NRF51x devices was developed for Keil. So, I installed Keil and nRF connect, and was able get a blinky example working.

When I tried to program the BLE UART example (no documentation on the intended function of this example anywhere?),  I got it to build and loaded the app onto the DK board. I also found the s130 SD through the Keil pack manager and loaded that onto the DK as well. The memory now looks like this in nrf connect:

The green block starts at 0x1B000, which is what is specified in Keil's options:

LED1 on the DK board then blinks, but neither my phone (Android 6.01, BT4.0) nor my windows 10 laptop (BT4.0) picks up a bluetooth signal from the DK. I read on another post that the NRF51x should be fine with 4.0 devices.

Is there an example where I can verify that bluetooth works? I've spent an entire day on the setup on something that should work out-of-the-box. How should I continue?

Thanks.

[Stian Røed Hafskjold]

Documentation for the BLE UART example is here: https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/topic/com.nordic.infocenter.sdk5.v12.3.0/ble_sdk_app_nus_eval.html?cp=5_5_7_4_2_2_19

You should flash the s130 Softdevice that is located in the SDK folder: components\softdevice\s130\hex  Use the nRF connect Programmer application to flash the SD as well. Or you can use nrfjprog (command line utility) to program the hex.

You can test the example using nRF connect for Android / iOS

[myNrfDoesntWork]

Thanks for the links. I do have nrf connect on android already.

So it looks like you're using SDK v12 for that. I looked for that version and downloaded it. Unfortunately, I get this pile of errors when building, which didn't happen before (not too sure what version i was on, no idea where to find it). Are you using keil 4 as well, or some other IDE?

Have you seen those errors before?

[myNrfDoesntWork]

Answer to my reply - the error was caused by Keil V5 not getting the include paths quite right. go into options, g++ tab, figure out where that file lives (should be in the SDK somewher, USE V12) and plop the link down.

Alternate solution might be to downgrade to Keil V4, apparently that path is set correctly on install... I haven't verified this method though.