RE: hang after flash.. no output chip rev2 soft device incompatible???

colin_was_here — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 15:58:24 GMT

hmoles-

thanks for the info.. last night I tried out what you said and diffed the emproject file, turns out it was on sdk17 all along, and it did match up in terms of flash adresses :).. then I looked into the NRF_FICR register and found out that they were all on AD, except for the laird eval kit which was on AC, this ruled out the hardware version as the issue..

So at that point I was pretty disappointed and called it a night.. coming in this morning I talked w a coworker who thought it'd be worth it to just erase the entire chip and re-flash.. I didn't actually think that'd work but I gave it a shot.. low and behold it booted perfectly and stopped at main this time.. :)

I gotta say I was pleasantly surprised by this.. when I was flashing before it would always say 'contents already match' for the softdevice.. then it would flash my app if it was different.. I always assumed that it was actually checking and comparing the flash... but apparently not.

anyways- takeaway is that I /you should always fully erase the chips from laird.. they come pre installed with a bunch of firmware and it's not enough just to flash over it..

Thx, Colin

RE: hang after flash.. no output chip rev2 soft device incompatible???

hmolesworth — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 23:27:43 GMT

Is it possible that the softdevice is already loaded on the 2 working boards?

There is a memory alignment issue if using a softdevice which differs from the project settings, which will happen if using SDK15 and SDv7 without adjusting the linker settings and indeed possible the include files at .\components\softdevice\s132\headers\ which are softdevice version dependent. Since the SDK v15 uses SD v 6, how come SD v7 is getting loaded in the first place?

Anyway, the softdevice is defined in the SDK v16 or v17 project file like this:

debug_additional_load_file="../../../../../../components/softdevice/s140/hex/s140_nrf52_7.2.0_softdevice.hex"

SDK v15 uses (typically) v6.1.1 like this:

debug_additional_load_file="../../../../../../components/softdevice/s140/hex/s140_nrf52_6.1.1_softdevice.hex"

The Sofdevice has to be specified in the project file Optons->Preprocessor Definitions as either 6 or 7:

NRF_SD_BLE_API_VERSION=7

The link map must match (this is nRF52840 SD V7.2.0):

linker_section_placement_macros="FLASH_PH_START=0x0;FLASH_PH_SIZE=0x100000;RAM_PH_START=0x20000000;RAM_PH_SIZE=0x40000;FLASH_START=0x27000;FLASH_SIZE=0xd9000;RAM_START=0x20002ae8;RAM_SIZE=0x3d518"

this is nRF52840 SD V6.1.1:

linker_section_placement_macros="FLASH_PH_START=0x0;FLASH_PH_SIZE=0x100000;RAM_PH_START=0x20000000;RAM_PH_SIZE=0x40000;FLASH_START=0x26000;FLASH_SIZE=0xda000;RAM_START=0x20002a98;RAM_SIZE=0x3d568"

Maybe the best starting point is to compare a BLE example project .emProject with the project you are using; the differences should be apparent.

More info here

https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/topic/sds_s140/SDS/s1xx/mem_usage/mem_usage.html

You can check the Rev.2 stuff by looking at NRF_FICR->INFO in the debugger or via a printf