Slow dfu throughput in nRF Connect Desktop

[Totto]

Hi,

I'm hoping someone can help me get faster throughput when doing DFU in nRF Connect Desktop

I'm using the following hardware / software:

- macOS 12.01

- nRF Connect v3.7.2

- Bluetooth Low Energy v2.5.3

- nRF52840-Dongle / nRF52840-DK

I'm seeing "speeds" of just above 1.0 kB/s, which results in completed DFU in about 5 minutes total.

Doing the same thing using nRF Connect Mobile on iPhone 12 takes about 2 minutes total.

In earlier versions of nRF Connect Desktop / Bluetooth Low Energy I was able to get higher throughput, don't know exactly how fast though.

Would be nice to speed up the DFU process as I have a lot of devices that I have to go through ^^

Thanks

-Totto

[Elfving]

Hey Totto! 

What SDK version is the bootloader based on?

Best regards,

Elfving

[Elfving]

Hey again Totto!

In any case Windows should be faster, and even more so with the new pc-ble-driver release. This new release sadly won't affect the speeds on MacOS however. 

If the issue mainly is the amount of DFUs to go through, I would recommend you to take a look at pc-nrfutil instead. You might be able to automate the process using a shell script.

Best regards,

Elfving

[Totto]

Hi Elfving, luckily I don't have any Windows OS available ^^

It's weird that it used to be faster, sadly I don't remember which versions I used before.

I'll definitely have a look at pc-nrfutil, thanks for the tip!

Best regards

Totto

[mrono]

Elfving said:

Windows should be faster, and even more so with the new pc-ble-driver release

I just tried this. I got about 4kB/s earlier, and now around 5-6kB/s. So the new release is faster.

Totto said:

it used to be faster, sadly I don't remember which versions I used before

I seem to recall that when SDK 15 was new I got around 8 kB/s. Then a new version came out that halved the speed.

Totto said:

I'll definitely have a look at pc-nrfutil, thanks for the tip!

Doing dfu from command line with nrfutil used to be much slower than with nRF Connect for Desktop. I think the latest update sometime last summer got the speed roughly up to the same ballpark.

If you can automate a manual process then you might get a speedup with nrfutil. But the actual DFU speed should not be faster.