Trouble setting up for nRF52840 Dongle

RE: Trouble setting up for nRF52840 Dongle

IanAber — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 18:51:42 GMT

Thanks for the link Einar. I got my code to work at last. I should have looked more closely but for some reason I was not expecting everything to have moved backwards quite so much. I remember when I first started fiddling with Zigbee and the nRF52840 that all the samples would work happily on the DK and the dongle. It seems that with every new release of the development environment it gets significantly more complicated and ignores most of the previous examples and settings. I moved to the NRF Connect SDK as I believed that is where things are being developed now but there is a lot of stuff that worked fine with the older SDK environments that is not supported, missing or simply doesn.t work with the current setup. I use the dongle because it is a very handy device for simple Zigbee stuff at a very affordable price. It seems that Nordic have all but abandoned it, and to some extent Zigbee too.

RE: Trouble setting up for nRF52840 Dongle

Einar Thorsrud — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 10:39:45 GMT

Hi,

Ah, I see. The ZigBee examples do not support the nRF52840 dongle so in that case you need to make some adjustments as described in this post.

RE: Trouble setting up for nRF52840 Dongle

IanAber — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 16:37:04 GMT

I did a little checking and found that I could correctly generate a programmable hex file from the blinky application albeit somewhat difficult to track down as SES shows only the .elf output. I then tried to use the three Zigbee examples in the NRF Connect SDK 1.6.1. The light bulb example fails to compile with the error.

#error "Choose supported PWM driver"

The light switch generates a zephyr.hex file in the same 'hidden' manner as the blinky example as the project in SES shows only the zephyr.elf output. Finding the zephyr.hex file in the same folder I dragged it to the prograammer and it appears to be correctly placed at 0x1000. I have no way to test it at the moment but at least the programmer is happy with the hex file.

The coordinator example shows a project output of merged.hex but this has the same issue as my own project and appears to be set to load at 0x0000 thus upsetting the programmer. This does, at least, mean that you too should be able to recreate my problem using the stock sample files. I am running with SDK 1.6.1 on Mac OS X.

RE: Trouble setting up for nRF52840 Dongle

IanAber — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 14:21:22 GMT

As you surmised it appears to be set to 0 instead of 0x1000...

How does this get set?

RE: Trouble setting up for nRF52840 Dongle

Einar Thorsrud — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 14:18:48 GMT

Hi,

[quote user="IanAber"]I did not add anything to override the starting address. I just did a search for CONFIG_LOAD_FLASH in the whole project and the only references were in the generates files which all show it being set to 0x1000.[/quote]

I see. Perhaps there is something else, but then I am not sure. You can see the start address of the hex file you added to nRF Connect Programming by hovering over it with the mouse in the File memory layout. It should be 0x1000. Is it?

RE: Trouble setting up for nRF52840 Dongle

IanAber — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 14:01:47 GMT

I did not add anything to override the starting address. I just did a search for CONFIG_LOAD_FLASH in the whole project and the only references were in the generates files which all show it being set to 0x1000.

I do not know how to read the hex file output to see what it is set to but the first few lines when view in Segger Embedded Studio are...

:020000040000FA
:1000000000830020217B00000F560300757B000059
:10001000757B0000757B0000757B00000000000010
:100020000000000000000000000000007D7A0000D9
:10003000757B000000000000ED790000D571000024
:10004000E17A00000D6D0300E17A0000E17A000022
:10005000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000E17A000034
:10006000D56C0300E17A0000E17A0000F36C030034
:10007000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000E17A000014
:10008000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000E17A000004
:10009000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000F4
:1000A000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000E4
:1000B000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000D4
:1000C000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000C4
:1000D000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000B4
:1000E000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000A4
:1000F000E17A0000E17A0000E17A0000E17A000094
:100100007BB972B90029BEBF00204FF0004106E064

Is there anything else I can share with you to make it easier to diagnose?

RE: Trouble setting up for nRF52840 Dongle

Einar Thorsrud — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 12:15:41 GMT

Hi,

What is the start address of the hex file you try to program? I ask because the Write button will be grayed out if the start address is lower than 0x1000. However, when you build for nrf52840dongle_nrf52840, the start address should automatically be 0x1000 (because FLASH_LOAD_OFFSET defaults to 0x1000 for that board). So, there must be some issue with your project. Did you by any chance specify CONFIG_FLASH_LOAD_OFFSET=0, overriding 0x1000?