PCA10040 Virtual COM port what is it used for

[robin]

Hi

We are using PCA10040 for a development and we are using P0.8 , we were setting it up to be No connect when low (IE Open collector) but it was being driven high and we realized it was used for the virtual com port as described in the PCA10040 user guide.

So we cut the jumpers so that it wasnt being driven high by the ATSAM3U2CA-AU device. 

We were expecting this to have some affect on the debugging interface or logging etc. But we can still program , debug and capture logs. 

So what is this com port used for ?

(Note using SDk 16.0.0  S132 and Segger IDE)

Thanks Robin

[awneil]

robin said:

We were expecting this to have some affect on the debugging interface

Why would you expect that?

Debugging used the SWI interface - as for any Cortex-M microcontroller.

robin said:

or logging

Logging can be configured to use Segger RTT, or the UART.

To use the UART, you need a COM port.

RTT uses the debug interface.

robin said:

So what is this com port used for ?

It connects the UART of the nRF52 chip to a virtual COM port on the development Host (eg, PC) - so that you can do serial comms between host & target.

eg, send text to a terminal and/or receive text from a terminal.