External SPI Flash to use with LittleFS on nRF9160 w/ MCUboot

RE: External SPI Flash to use with LittleFS on nRF9160 w/ MCUboot

Jared — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 20:57:22 GMT

After researching it a bit more it seems related to the partition manager. Even without an external flash, I'm finding that the wrong partition address and size are being referenced.

It seems as if this is not the first time someone has had issues with the Nordic Partition Manager. It looks like this was a discussion about this a while back here.

Seems like there's more information here related to all of this.

RE: External SPI Flash to use with LittleFS on nRF9160 w/ MCUboot

Jared — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 02:58:52 GMT

Hey Sigurd!

Thanks for the reply.

I actually like to leave the DFU capabilities alone. The external flash would be for application storage only. For whatever reason though, as you can see above, it defaults to NRF_FLASH_DRV_NAME instead of W25Q16JV.

When I disable MCUBoot I'm Abe to run the LittleFS example. Not so much when it is. I figured it had to do something with the Nordic based scripts that assign partitions for SPM, MCUboot etc etc

I'll be getting back to it in a bit. I've been working on some of the Bluetooth bits.

RE: External SPI Flash to use with LittleFS on nRF9160 w/ MCUboot

Sigurd — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 08:50:54 GMT

Hi,

Unfortunately, I don’t have a w25q16jv flash device, but we have an on-board 64 Mb external flash memory (MX25R6435F) on the nRF52840 DK and nRF5340 PDK that perhaps can be used to recreate this.

Is the goal to store a DFU image in the external flash ? If yes, did you try it without using littlefs?

If you want to configure MCUboot to use external flash for the secondary slot , take a look at the chapter “Flash partitions used by MCUboot” at this page http://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF_Connect_SDK/doc/latest/nrf/ug_bootloader.html#adding-mcuboot-as-an-upgradable-bootloader