A third party NRF52832 module unable to connect to PC via SWD

[KevinR]

Dear all,

I have a NRF52832 module (EBYTE E73) and before yesterday, everything was fine. 

We had a outdoor test last week and till then, everything was fine. 

After the weekend, I came back to check and I see an error in SES indicating it cannot connect. 

We are using SWD to connect to the board. 

I tried the following method. The voltage on the device VDD is 3.3V. 

- nRF connect : gave me errorcode: CouldNotOpenDevice (0x4) Lowlevel error: JLINKARM_DLL_ERROR (ffffff9a)

- nrfjprog --recover : Error: cannot connect to any nRF device. Please make sure a device is connected to the debugger and supplied.

- J-Link Commander : connect command does not work. At the end, it would display a "Cannot connect to target" message. 

I can still see the JLINK in the device manager and it is displayed in nRF connect. 

Checked with another JLINK module to see if it is the debugger problem but same thing as well. 

I know the board is still working fine because when I power it up, I can see data coming in through BLE. 

I just can connect to it...

Any suggestion is appreciated. 

Thank you.

[Amanda Hsieh]

Hi Kevin, 

Please make sure a device is connected to the debugger and supplied.

Have you tried other USB HUB/USB cables/PC/JLINK cable (connect with the board)...? Maybe the connection between J-Link and the device has a problem. 

-Amanda H.

[KevinR]

Thanks for your reply. 

Yes. We checked with other JLINK and USB cables but all show same result. 

I re-soldered all the connection cables and checked for shorts or opens but it didn't help. 

Now I am thinking perhaps the parts involved with the SWD part was damaged during our outdoor test. 

We have constructed a system with another nRF module and that one is good for now.

I really appreciate your support though.