is ble connectivity fw pre installed in PCA10059?

[astella]

To the kind attention of Nordic support team,

reading this https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/f/nordic-q-a/39630/windows-command-line-dfu-over-ble-with-pca10059 thread,

I understood that PCA10059 comes pre programmed with USB bootloader and connectivity firmware. Is it true?

In the mentioned thread, it was asked to not put the -f option because PCA10059 doesn't need to be programmed with any connectivity

firmware. May you please confirm it? PCA10059 comes already pre programmed with both USB bootloader and connectivity firmware?

Thank you for your kindness

[demcanulty]

Hi astella, we just spent the last month figuring a lot of this out.  The easiest place to find the compiled connectivity firmware is here in the pc ble driver releases:  https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/pc-ble-driver/releases

Look in the share folder for hex files that are labeled with the soft device number.  The files ending in pkg.zip are the PCA10059 packages and you need to use nrfutil to load them onto the dongle.  

nrfConnect (and the javascript library) uses sd_api_3, the python wrapper uses sd_api_5, and the pc ble driver C library is compatible with all of them that are available, but you have to make sure that you link the right soft device library in when you compile.  

If you want to find the actual code that is compiled to make the connectivity firmware for the pc-ble-driver, there are diff files in the pc-ble-driver repo, in the hex folder.  The cmake script downloads the SDKs, saves them to a temp folder on your drive, then applies the diff file to the whole SDK.  Then it compiles the to the hex and pkg.zip files that you see there in the release.  

It's all quite nifty when it works, but it can take a while to figure it when it doesn't.