nRF52811 replacement over nRF52832 plug-and-play ?

[StephaneJ]

Hi,

Our entire board is running around a nRF52832. Recently it has been difficult to find some of these SOC. Is it safe to replace it with the nRF52811 without changing the board layout and the firmware ?

Thanks !

[StephaneJ]

Can I use the same bootloader for both of them ?

[Simonr]

Hi

You can use the same code in general for the two devices, but not the exact same .hex files I'm afraid. That will likely be a problem, as nRF52832 code is typically build by using FPU-instructions, which the nRF52811 does not support. You also need to take into concideration that the size of the Flash and RAM on the two boards will be different, so you might want to store the bootloader in different areas of the memory for instance. And if the two applications use different SoftDevices you need to change that as well.

Best regards,

Simon

[StephaneJ]

Hi Simonr

Yes our current version for nrf52832 use the s132 but I think this version of softdevice it's not available for the nrf52811. So I was planning using the s140.

At this moment, my section placement macros are like this and it's working on the nrf52832 :

FLASH_PH_START=0x0
FLASH_PH_SIZE=0x80000
RAM_PH_START=0x20000000
RAM_PH_SIZE=0x10000
FLASH_START=0x78000
FLASH_SIZE=0x6000
RAM_START=0x200057b8
RAM_SIZE=0xa848

I don't know how to update it since this is something that I have been given as it is.

[Simonr]

Hi

Depending on what functionalities you need from the SoftDevice I would suggest looking at the S112/S113 SoftDevices for nRF52811, as the S140 will take up a lot of RAM and Flash memory on the nRF52811, which is already rather restricted with its 192 kB flash and 24 kB RAM., so the room for application and bootloader will be limited if you opt for the S140.

As for how to edit the RAM and Flash memory, please check out our guide on the matter here.

Best regards,

Simon