nrfutil, raspberry pi, secure dfu, nrf52832

[jowei]

Hi Nordic:

I want to build a raspberry connected to a 52832 board via uart,

this raspberry pi with 52832 board need doing secure DFU to remote BLE device, the raspberryPI and 52832 board are inside a box, we can't replace 52832 board by 52840 dongle because

a dongle outside of the box is not acceptable.

Our software architecture in this box is following:

1. Raspberry pi run nrfutil, maybe also need pc-ble-driver.

2. 52832 board has connectivity hex firmware, but uart setting in connectivity firmware should be correct, 52832 board's uart port setting is not same as 52832 DK.

3. So Rapsberry pi could doing secure DFU to remote BLE device.

My questions are:

1. Is there nrfutil for ARM platform version? if it's no, Do I have any other choice of a secure DFU utility on raspberry platform?

2. How to change UART pin setting of connectivity firmware?

3. Does our above software architecture make sense? please comment, thanks.

Regards.

[Sigurd]

Hi,

1) nrfutil is really a python application, and I would think you can use it on the Raspberry Pi as long as you have all the requirements installed. I would start by trying to install it using pip with "pip install nrfutil". You can find more information on GitHub. Some other relevant posts: link 1, link 2, link 3

2) In order to create connectivity firmware that is compatible with custom nRF52 hardware you have to apply the patch found here (nRF5_SDK_15.3.0_connectivity.patch), to the connectivity example in SDK 15.3. You can find the connectivity example in SDK_FOLDER\examples\connectivity\ble_connectivity\pca10040\ser_s132_hci. You can then change the pinout in pca10040.h or create a custom_board.h to match your custom hardware pin settings.

3) Based on the description on what you want to do, then yes.

[jowei]

Hi Sigurd:

Thanks for reply, 

Today I do many compatibility test, 

So far I only can do DFU-BLE for other device as following setting:

- on a windows10 PC with python2.7,

- no matter nrfutil3.5 or 4.0 or 5.2

- 52840-dongle with a firmware from nrf-connect-pc-programmer-1.3.1 auto download

One thing I want to confirm, my 52840-dongle with the firmware from nrf-connect-pc, but when I run "python2.7 serial_port_enum.py NRF52", 

There is show "0 serial port found" (see following), but DFU ble is working)

So is "serial_port_enum" can still work in your environment?

Regards

[Sigurd]

jowei said:

So is "serial_port_enum" can still work in your environment?

 You probably need to make some changes to the script to get it working with the dongle. See this and this post.

[jowei]

Hi Sigurd

I still can't work well, after read the links you provide, 

Here is my understanding based on RPI with 52840 dongle( I use 52840 dongle first to reduce complexity, using 52832 custom board is the future task)

- In my PC environment, nrfutil5.2 + dependently pc-ble-driver ( which is "pc_ble_shared_sd_api_v3.dll), 

I can do dfu-ble to remote device.

- So my choice is to install nrfutil5.2 + linux-pc-ble-shared-sd-api_v3.so for my RPI.

But it's difficult for me to build pc-ble-driver for ARM platform, because vcpkg for ARM

Their are a unofficial pc-ble-driver version from:

https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/nordic/nordic-blog/b/blog/posts/accessing-the-softdevice-api-from-python-with-pc-b

But the version is too old (sd-api-v1), so could you provide pc-ble-driver-v3 of ARM platform or guide me how to build it for ARM platform?

Regards.

Joseph

[Sigurd]

jowei said:

But it's difficult for me to build pc-ble-driver for ARM platform, because vcpkg for ARM

Try downloading the pre-compiled library from here:

https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/pc-ble-driver/releases

i.e. download the nrf-ble-driver-4.1.1-linux_x86_64.tar.gz, and find the .so in the lib folder.