Exercising an nRF51822/test firmware

[Marc Nicholas]

Howdy,

In a similar vein to my recent question about production programming....and nothing to do with takign an nRF51822 out for a walk :)

We'll write a simple test program for our nRF51822 devices that exercises the attached peripherals (they're mostly I2C, but some analog and digital I/O too) and echo test results over our 'debug port' (we have two pogo pin pads setup as a UART.

Does anyone have any other recommendations on exercising an nRF51822 part before sending it to a new home? Particular areas of interest:

• Radio (obviously)
• Flash (we use it heavily)
• Config register checking (I believe we know enough about nRFjprog to do this now...but open to ideas)

Happy to have offline discussions with anyone if there're commercial reasons for not discussing publicly :)

Cheers,

-m

[Ole Morten]

All our devices are fully tested in the chip production, so there shouldn't be any requirements for doing a lot of testing of the chip itself in an end-user product. However, it's useful to verify that radio components have been mounted correctly.

One method for doing this is to use DTM, as described in nAN-34. Even though it's written for the nRF8001, it's just as applicable for the nRF51822, and the methods described are perfectly valid for both.

A simpler way could be to just use the Master Emulator dongle or something else to just make sure that you're able to pick up advertisement packets with expected RSSI. As long as the packets come trough on the correct channel and with more or less the expected RSSI, you can be fairly certain that the RF components have been mounted correctly.

[Marc Nicholas]

Hi Ole! :)

We haven't played with DTM yet. Our partner in Japan is putting the radio module together, so I'll ask them how much testing they're doing.

I think we'll build a test node that has a couple of characteristics and have the test firmware on each device read/write those characteristics to ensure everything is working just fine. And also check the RSSI to see if it's reasonable given the proximity (the setup will be relatively static).

Thanks for the feedback, as always! Hopefully this thread is helpful for others and inspires them to think about testing their final product :)

-m

[Ole Morten]

No problem! As always, I'm happy if you could accept the answer if you found it useful. :)