Cannot program nRF52840 Dongle with nRF Connect SDK HEX files

[LukeT]

Hi there,

I recently purchased some nRF52840 Dongles for evaluation.

I installed the nRF Connect SDK v1.4.1 and attempted to build a few of the sample projects using the SES(Nordic Edition) v.5.10b and v5.30a, targeting the nRF52840. I was able to successfully compile and build some of the sample projects, for example the Zigbee light_switch project, other's won't build at all.

I then tried to use the nRF Programmer to flash the dongle but there appears to be something wrong with the hex file(I suspect the address ranges aren't correct) and i cannot write the image. The only option available is to reset the device.

 

I have seen others having similar issues and have tried some of the options given but no luck. For instance when using the SES Nordic edition i do not have any linker or pre-compiler options available in the Project Options.

Luke 

[LukeT]

Will mark this as resolved by verifying my suggested answer.

I'd also like to point out that even selecting the correct boardname this didn't fix the issue for all of the sample SDK projects, so there still seems to be an offset issue with the address range of the application in the Hex file output.

Luke

[Marte Myrvold]

Hi,

Have you checked whether the examples you are having an issue with is supported on the nRF52840 Dongle? You can see supported boards under the "requirements" part in the documentation of the example, like here. If the dongle is not on the list of supported boards, we cannot guarantee that the example will work out of the box on the dongle.

Best regards,

Marte

[LukeT]

Hi Marte, thank you for your response and pointing that out.

I had assumed (based on the information provided here)  that the most of the SDK projects could be adapted to work on the nRF5280 dongle by adjusting the memory layout? As I mentioned previously, I don't have the options to set these via the linker and precompiler in the SES(Nordic edition), so I assumed that by selecting the Board Name in the "Open nRF Connect SDK Project" widget, this gets abstracted away and the memory layout is auto configured.

Luke     

[Marte Myrvold]

Hi,

That guide is for the nRF5 SDK, so it won't be similar as working with NCS. Are you trying to flash as described in that guide, using the bootloader from the nRF5 SDK? If so, you shouldn't be able to flash any of the NCS examples.

Instead, you should follow this guide for programming the nRF52840 Dongle in NCS.

You're correct that in most of the examples in the nRF5 SDK the only change to be made is to change the flash and RAM memory layout, and that selecting the correct board in NCS should handle this. However, another issue that might arise is that there are things that are not supported on the dongle that might be a part of the samples in NCS, such as using printk, which you can read about in this case.

Please let me know whether using the guide I linked for programming the dongle fixes your issue or not.

Best regards,

Marte

[LukeT]

Hi Marte,

Thank you for this additional information. I'll give it a try and report back if.

Thanks again,

Luke