NRF52840 (PCA10059) Openthread Router - Example

[jibba]

Hi

The latest OpenThread/Zigbee SDK has no examples for openthread with the PCA10059 (No MBR, executing directly from 0x0 @ flash start).

Ive tried now multiple times combining examples together but i cannot build it, as required libraries are either not available for the NRF52840 or outdated.

There are examples of compiling the libs (openthread) yourself, ive done this but this is not all of it required for example for the openthread-simple-server.

- I would very much welcome all the source code in the SDK so i would not need to work with precompiled static libraries.

- I would also very much welcome examples for all your boards, not just some of them.

Would you be able to extend the SDK?

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Hi,

It is not entirely correct that there are no Thread examples for the PCA10059 dongle. Both CLI and NCP examples comes with projects for PCA10059. The main reason why we provide limited examples for the dongle is that is does not come with any built-in debug-capabilities, making it a bad fit for development. The dongle is primarily intended for use with out development tools, like nRF Connect applications, Thread Border Router, etc.

It is of course possible to build other applications for the dongle as well, but due to the lack of debug-capabilities we would like to limit the number of customers that use this as a development platform. For this reason, I do not think we will extend the nRF5 SDK for Thread and Zigbee with more examples for this board.

You can follow the instructions in this tutorial for porting an existing PCA10056 project to PCA10059. You may also need to move the "Thread persistent data" region in flash as well, to prevent it from overlapping with the dongle Bootloader. Note that the dongle does not have a UART to USB interface, like we have on the DK. If you want to use UART for logging, etc, this must be done through the USB port of the nRF52840, using the CDC ACM class.

Regarding including full source code for OpenThread in the nRF5 SDK, this would make the compilation process take much longer time than what it does with the precompiled library approach. If you build the libraries on your own computer, you should be able to debug the source code as you would if building from source. You can also add the source files to your project after cloning the OpenThread repository. A list of required files, paths, and symbols are shown in the Makefiles used for building the libs.

Best regards,
Jørgen