Exercising an nRF51822/test firmware

RE: Exercising an nRF51822/test firmware

Ole Morten — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 11:43:10 GMT

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

RE: Exercising an nRF51822/test firmware

Marc Nicholas — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 17:57:38 GMT

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

RE: Exercising an nRF51822/test firmware

Ole Morten — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 10:36:02 GMT

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.