Getting started with Eval board

[SidPrice]

I have just received my nRF52 development board and I have tried to program one of the pre-bjui;t examples (Blinky). The USB drive on the board appears and if I drag the hex file for the board (10040) onto the drive, the file copies but nothing occurs on the board. The file remains visible until I restart the board.

I was expecting the file to be flashed and the example to run. Pressing buttons does nothing.

[SidPrice]

Seems this example hex file may be bad? I just flashed the freertos blinky and it works.

[Karl Ylvisaker]

Hello,

I have just received my nRF52 development board and I have tried to program one of the pre-bjui;t examples (Blinky). The USB drive on the board appears and if I drag the hex file for the board (10040) onto the drive, the file copies but nothing occurs on the board.

Could you confirm for me which Blinky application you are using - is it the hardware peripheral(no SoftDevice/BLE capabilities) version, or one of the BLE blinky examples? 

The file remains visible until I restart the board.

I was expecting the file to be flashed and the example to run. Pressing buttons does nothing.

Yes, if you drag and drop the prebuilt hex file into the JLink then the debugger leg should flash quickly on the device, and the JLink device should restart by itself, starting up with the newly flashed firmware. However, if you are using the hardware blinky example, then the leds will blink regardless of button pushes. If you are using the BLE blinky examples, then LED 1 will be on to signalize that the device is advertising/not connected to any other device. While in this state, button pushes will do nothing, if I recall correctly.

Lastly, I just tried tested the SDK 16 hardware peripheral blinky application on my own nRF52 DK, and it behaved as expected.
Which SDK version are you using?

Best regards,
Karl

[SidPrice]

Karl,

I am using the examples\ble_peripheral\ble_app_blinky\hex\ble_app_blinky_pca10040_s132.hex. I drop the file onto the JLink "drive". I see the file copied to the drive. The file stays visible on the drive until I cycle the power, then it is gone. On startup the eval board turns on LED1, it does not blink.

I think the SDK version is nRF_MDK_8_27_0.

Sid

[SidPrice]

Sorry, the SDK is nRF5 SDK v16.0.0,

Sid

[Karl Ylvisaker]

Hello Sid,

SidPrice said:

I am using the examples\ble_peripheral\ble_app_blinky\hex\ble_app_blinky_pca10040_s132.hex.

SidPrice said:

The file stays visible on the drive until I cycle the power, then it is gone. On startup the eval board turns on LED1, it does not blink.

 This is the correct behavior for this example, as can be read in the ble_peripheral Blinky example documentation. It runs a contrary to the usual Blinky applications(which you can try out from the peripheral Blinky example(non BLE, only LEDs) because it includes the use of BLE communication between two devices.
The way the BLE Blinky examples is set up is to demonstrate the transfer of a button press between devices, one running the BLE peripheral Blinky and one running the BLE central Blinky example.
Sorry for any confusion this might have caused.

SidPrice said:

I see the file copied to the drive. The file stays visible on the drive until I cycle the power, then it is gone.

This is partially correct - once programmed the file should disappear from the file manager. However, the device should reboot itself within ~5 seconds of the firmware being copied to the JLink.
Could you try to program the device(drop the .hex file in the JLink file explorer) and then just wait till it resets itself? It should, within a short time after the transfer completes.
The debugger LED on the DK should also blink, following this.

Best regards,
Karl