mergehex with s310v1 and .bin generation

RE: mergehex with s310v1 and .bin generation

Vito — Tue, 26 May 2015 07:18:24 GMT

Thanks. Indeed I didn't realize that joining in a .bin file addresses so far from each other was not a good idea. I'll just enable the readback protection after flashing the code memory area.

RE: mergehex with s310v1 and .bin generation

testy — Tue, 26 May 2015 01:05:24 GMT

Segger J-Flash offers merge too (Open data file, Merge data file, Save data file as... bin)
S310 v1.0.0 won't run without readback protect (NRF_ERROR_SOFTDEVICE_NOT_ENABLED failure when sd_softdevice_enable is called)
merged bin file (containing UICR) will be about 256MB...

RE: mergehex with s310v1 and .bin generation

RK — Mon, 25 May 2015 13:20:22 GMT

You can use objcopy, the standard binutils utility, with the --remove-section (-R). --gap-fill and --pad-to to make 3 separate bin files, one from 0x00000000 to 0x1FFFF, 1 byte before the start of program code with the first 2 sections in the softdevice hex file (ie remove section 3), a file from from 0x20000 to 0x10000FFF with the program code, and one from 0x10001000 to 0x10001018 with the third section of the softdevice (ie remove sections 1 and 2). Then you just cat them together and you have one long bin file you can use.

I believe the sections are called '.sec1' and '.sec2' and '.sec3'

The first piece for instance would look like this

objcopy -Iihex -Obinary -R .sec3 --gap-fill=0xff --pad-to=0x20000 s310_nrf51422_1.0.0_softdevice.hex s310_nrf51422_1.0.0_softdevice.1.bin

the rest are similar

RE: mergehex with s310v1 and .bin generation

Vito — Mon, 25 May 2015 12:12:43 GMT

Thanks. Actually I made the long story short losing some details. The chips are already mounted on the boards, which are equipped with another microcontroller. The nrf51422 get its firmware (and updates) from the main uC, which gets it over the air. The main uC has a custom SWD script able to flash the nrf51422, and it always worked fine (but it works with .bin format).

RE: mergehex with s310v1 and .bin generation

Nguyen Hoan Hoang — Mon, 25 May 2015 12:05:14 GMT

How about this alternative here. No mergehex, no hex2bin require. Parallel programming multiple devices.