Flashing alternating applications nRFgo Studio

RE: Flashing alternating applications nRFgo Studio

karlsen — Mon, 06 Jul 2015 12:40:07 GMT

Thanks, then we got total clarity on my flashing issues!! Doing it with nRFgo was just my last resort try since I didn't get it to work with JLink in Linux, this was solved by RK above and was an error by me.

RE: Flashing alternating applications nRFgo Studio

RK — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 15:56:58 GMT

Haha - that was from the school of 'been there, done that'. Happy to have been able to help.

RE: Flashing alternating applications nRFgo Studio

karlsen — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 15:15:17 GMT

What can I say, no I didn't. Never suspected this since interaction with the device worked nicely in all other aspects. The option -device nrf51 did the trick, also w4 works correctly when having this. Many thanks for you persistence!!

RE: Flashing alternating applications nRFgo Studio

RK — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 15:05:39 GMT

definitely odd as that's why my RKNRFGO code does, just loadbin to replace data (after enabling writes).

You are passing -device nrf51 to the jlink command line exe right? Just to be sure as that tends to break things if you don't

RE: Flashing alternating applications nRFgo Studio

karlsen — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 15:00:05 GMT

Sorry tried this also two bin files one with 0x20002060 and the other with 0x0001830D. Erased flash, flashed the first to memory with loadbin, checked the position with mem32 and correctly read 0x20002060. Flashed the second file with loadbin, checked with mem32, and all zeros.

RE: Flashing alternating applications nRFgo Studio

RK — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 14:31:06 GMT

nothing surprising there - that's how flash memory works. erase clears it to 1s, only 0s can be written to it, once a bit is zero, it stays that way until everything is erased back to 1.

but your test above is bogus and has nothing to do with programming the chip. You're just writing words in memory which does exactly that, writes a word in memory. That's not what nrfgo does when it writes a file to memory, it's not what JLink does when it does the equivalent of 'loadbin', it erases the flash it's going to write to (JLink knows how to erase pages) and then writes. Make yourself 2 4-byte bin files and use loadbin to write them alternately to the flash at the same address instead of using w4.

RE: Flashing alternating applications nRFgo Studio

karlsen — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 14:17:40 GMT

Ok this is now even further narrowed down. When the flash is erased all ones are written to every position, writing to any of the positions works nicely since this means that some positions will go from 1 to 0. Once a position has gone to 0 it can not be brought back to 1 with another write only by a full erase of the flash. Hardware, firmware issue? Doing the same thing in the RAM section works perfectly!

RE: Flashing alternating applications nRFgo Studio

karlsen — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 04:40:03 GMT

Ok, thanks for the answer. Do I have a hardware problem then? I have: Firmware: J-Link OB-SAM3U128-V2-NordicSemi compiled Jun 16 2015 17:08:23 Hardware: V1.00 I do:

w4 4001e504 2 // enable erase

w4 4001e50c 1 // erase all

w4 4001e504 1 // enable write

then w4 mem value //check with mem32 and correct content

then again w4 mem anotherValue //check with mem32, not correct content anymore

RE: Flashing alternating applications nRFgo Studio

RK — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 23:45:52 GMT

That is an incorrect conclusion. JLink is more than capable of erasing and reprogamming any and all bits of the chip without full chip erase, lots of us do it every single day. So you have a problem, but that's not the answer.

RE: Flashing alternating applications nRFgo Studio

karlsen — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 20:38:48 GMT

After lots of investigations using the JLinkExe I have reached the following conclusion. Each area in the flash can only be flashed once by the JLink tools, if you want to flash that area again you need to do a full erase of the flash before flashing the area. Maybe this is expected behavior but I have not seen it in any documentation.

RE: Flashing alternating applications nRFgo Studio

karlsen — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 21:18:55 GMT

Thanks for trying to help. I edited my original question above since I could not add images in comment.

RE: Flashing alternating applications nRFgo Studio

Petter Myhre — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 11:54:02 GMT

I'm able to do this. Are you using the latest version of nRFgo Studio? I'm not sure how to reproduce the error you get. If I try to flash a hex with memory address 0x00000 after I have flash a SoftDevice I get.

Are you sure your blinky project starts at 0x18000? You can check the the hex file.

It should look like this if the start address is 0x18000:

Not like this (start address is 0x00000):

Edit 06.07.2015: I have been able to reproduce the error, this is a bug in nRFgo Studio. It should be able to erase the old application and flash the new one. This will be fixed in the next release. In the meantime an Erase all is required.