Official BLE and UART Combined DFU bootloader?

[droberson]

Hello,

I see a number of threads on the Nordic devzone where people are asking about official support for a DFU bootloader that combines BLE and UART for transports. Most of these posts lead to long discussions of debugging issues with manually combining the BLE and UART DFU examples.

Question 1: Has Nordic since created an official bootloader example that combines BLE and UART?

For the project I am working on, I am creating two bootloaders based on SDK 15.3:

• BLE + UART
• BLE + USB UART (COM port)

Question 2: I have read that for the traditional Nordic UART DFU examples, hardware flow control is required. Is this true? Our custom boards don't use hardware flow control nor have pins to support it.

Any help to jumpstart my development is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Derek

[Hung Bui]

Hi Derek, 

1. No, we don't have official bootloader example that combined the 2 transports. But the modification needed is minimal, you just need to include the transport .c and .h file and it should work. 

2. Yes HWFC is needed, unless you use a very low baudrate, such as 9600bps. The reason is that the potential overflow when the CPU is halted when doing flash write and flash erase. 

[droberson]

Hey Hung,

I will implement and test at 9600 baud next week and report my results. If I have no issues, I will close this ticket.

Thanks for your help in clarifying!