nRFgo Studio makes no mistakes when it comes to telling me chip revision - does it?

[muhkuhns]

I bought 5 Seeed Micro Ble Modules. On their Website they answered a question 7months ago, that they ship with QFAA G0. I connected them via SWD with my nRF51-DK.

God damn it.

I checked nRFgo Studio and it shows: QFAAC0 (0x001d). But the Softdevice is v.6. Can that be? They do state

There are two batches of BLE Micro modules, one with Nordic S110 SoftDevice 6.0 and "DfuTarg" BLE device name, one with S110 SoftDevice 7.0

In their wiki, but after I looked at the combatibility matrix.pdf I thought both had to be use Revision 2 nrf51822 then.

Please have a look at this screenshot: This is the error when I hit the Read button.

I got a little heart attack right now. It was cruel enough not to get any usable modules with revision 3 but 1...

The important question for me at this moment is actually: The nRFgo Studio does not lie. Does it? So it is 100% a revision 1 chip?

[RK]

Can't imagine nrfStudio makes a mistake, but you can check it for yourself using JLink. First find where JLink is on your box, I have no idea I'm on OSX, it'll be there somewhere, probably c:\Program Files(64)\Segger\something, then run from a command prompt

JLink -if swd -device nrf51

at the prompt which should be JLink>

mem32 0x1000005c, 1

on an old devkit I get

J-Link>mem32 0x1000005c, 1
1000005C = FFFF0044 

that's rev 0x44 which from this document is QFAA GC0.

My more recent nrf51-DK and NRF51 dongle report

J-Link>mem32 0x1000005c,1
1000005C = FFFF0071 

Which isn't listed in that document but since I can read the chip itself I see it's a QFACAB which is an engineering release of the 32kB RAM version. The document does say that engineering releases won't have the same HWID. I guess the early boards went out with engineering chips on them.

I'm fairly sure your's will say FFFF001D and therefore yes it's a rev.1 chip. That doesn't explain the error message, nrfStudio should still be able to connect to the chip, however old it is, you are somewhat restricted by what version of the SD you can run.

That's regrettably a problem buying the cheaper dev boards from 3rd parties, you don't always know what you're getting, or you don't always get what you expect. That, however, you'll have to take up with seeed micro.

[muhkuhns]

Thanks for the steps. I followed them and as expected I got the revision 1 once more confirmed. Guess I'll just try to upload SD8.0.0 and a SDK8 based application and check if I'm lucky... but first I have to figure out how to program an external board. Haven't made it yet to work.