Broken card? Can't start programs on nRF91.

[Ulf Hedblom]

Hi

Our nRF9160DK card seems to have stopped working. We attached a sensor to the card (We might have connected the reset pin on the P7 strip) and now I can't start any program on the nRF91, any attempt ends up in this and then nothing:

2019-09-19T13:16:45.854Z DEBUG modem << SPM: NS image at 0xc000
2019-09-19T13:16:45.857Z DEBUG modem << SPM: NS MSP at 0x200258b0
2019-09-19T13:16:45.858Z DEBUG modem << SPM: NS reset vector at 0x12e7d
2019-09-19T13:16:45.860Z DEBUG modem << SPM: prepare to jump to Non-Secure image.
2019-09-19T13:16:47.478Z DEBUG modem << ***** Booting Zephyr OS build v1.14.99-ncs3-snapshot2-1276-g4493a423a645 *****

Everything looks fine from SEGGER Embedded Studio, I can connect to the card, Erase all and send the program to the card (It looks fin in the nRF Connect Programmer).

I am also able to run programs on the nRF52 without any problem.

Is there anything that we could try to do to get the card working again or is it simply broken?

[Ulf Hedblom]

Drop this issue.

We managed to get another card to test this on and had the same issue. Then I switched to an old copy of the ncs/nrf/ folder (with zephyr and everything) that I had as a backup and that worked. So apparently something in that gigabyte of data has been corrupted. I'll try to figure out how.

Sorry for the inconvenience and for any time you've spent on this.

[Håkon Alseth]

Ulf Hedblom said:

Sorry for the inconvenience and for any time you've spent on this.

 Nothing to worry about. It might be our fault that your device is behaving this way.

We do have an issue with nrfjprog v10.3.0, where erasing page-by-page can be problematic, so do try "nrfjprog -e" first, to erase the flash, then program the device.

Could you try this?

This issue is only visible on nRF9160 devices, and will be fixed in the next release of nrf5x command line tools (which nrfjprog is a part of).

 

I apologize for the inconvenience.

 

Kind regards,

Håkon

[Ulf Hedblom]

Hi Håkon

I am at the moment unable to reproduce this problem so I am not able to test the fix.

Is there another version of the nrfjprog connected to the v1.0.0 tag of nRF Connect SDK? In that case you might be correct on what is causing this.

(We got the problem on the untagged version we downloaded to get the BME680 to work, I then switched back to the v1.0.0 version and then things started working again, I downloaded another copy of the untagged version and it still worked and now it seems like I can switch to either of there three versions and still be able to have it work (That was long, rambling and slightly confusing but I hope you got it))

Kind regards

Ulf

[Ulf Hedblom]

I think my brain may have already stopped for the weekend on Friday afternoon, not much of what I wrote make sense.

If there was a problem with the erase-functionality everything should have worked on the other nRF9160DK?

From what I understand at the moment, the thing I did to fix this was to build the program in the v1.0.0 version and run that on the card.

Well it is working now and I can't reproduce the error so there is not much I can do to localize it if I don't manage to run into it again.

Kind regards

Ulf