nRF52840-Dongle not recognised by Wireshark in Windows 10 and reset button no longer works

[SimonInCanada]

I have bought the nRF52840 to use it as a BLE Sniffer. I do not have any prior experience with Nordic products but I have developed several BLE systems using Silabs and Infineon SoCs.

I tried to follow the lengthy installation instructions on the Nordic web site to load versious software, download firmware for the dongle and configure WireShark, etc. I tried to load the firmware V4.1.0. This seemed to work except that after seemingly programming the firmware okay it did display an error message which due to unfamiliarity with the Programmer 2.0.1 I did not realise needed to be saved.

Now the device does appear in Windows Device Manager as a Virtual Com Port, and Programmer recognises it as "RF Sniffer for Bluetooth" but says this message when starting up if the dongle is connected:

Error when fetching device versions: readFwInfo error

The left hand pane on the main Programmer window says "Unknown" and is greyed out. The right hand one shows a green block in the bottom. All the controls under Device are greyed out.

Now pressing the reset button on the board does nothing and the LED remains out. Wireshark doesn't seem to recognise it.

Have I somehow "bricked" this device, and if so, is there a way of getting it back? I already tried reading the other posts with similar subjects and also this https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/guides/short-range-guides/b/getting-started/posts/nrf52840-dongle-programming-tutorial and I am not familiar enough with Nordic terminology to find that much help. It says something about programming it using a J-Link (which I do have) and SWD, but then launches off into a discussion about voltages, and I see nowhere to connect SWD anyway.

Any ideas please?

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

As far as the dongle is concerned, all you need to do to use it for sniffing is to program it with the provided hex file (which is part of the nRF Sniffer for Bluetooth LE zip) using nRF Connect Programmer. Remember to push the sideways button to enter DFU mode first. As long as that is OK the dongle should be ready for use. Other issue sis probably with the SW installation of the Wireshark plugin. As you mentioned there are quite a few steps, so it is important to follow the instructions in detail.

(The tutorial you refer to is mostly relevant when you want to build applications for the dongle, and not for simply using prebuilt applications. And regarding bricking the dongle and SWD etc. there is no risk of bricking the dongle as long as you don't use SWD. You can always enter USB DFU bootloader mode by pressing the sideways button.)

[SimonInCanada]

Hi Einar

Thank you for your advice. I didn't realise there were two buttons, but was able to put the board back into DFU mode using the one that's activated horizontally to the board and load both V3.1.0 and V4.1.0 okay (not at the same time). But at the end of the load for either, I got a message like:

2021-12-13T14:32:25.090Z INFO Uploading image through SDFU: 98%
2021-12-13T14:32:25.109Z INFO Uploading image through SDFU: 100%
2021-12-13T14:32:25.246Z INFO All dfu images have been written to the target device
2021-12-13T14:32:25.257Z DEBUG Will wait for device FDC359B3BA10
2021-12-13T14:32:28.258Z DEBUG Timeout when waiting for attachment of device with serial number FDC359B3BA10
2021-12-13T14:32:28.258Z ERROR Failed to write: Timeout while waiting for device  FDC359B3BA10 to be attached and enumerated

As you can guess, the other day this meant nothing to me except to make me suspeiciaous that I had done something wrong...

For now, I ignored this message and tried to carry on with the overall installation.

Now, knowing that you were confident that the device had not been bricked and should have worked made me spend the additional time going through the details on the nRF web site and actually these did work almost as specified, so though it took a while, I did eventually have a working dongle.

So thanks, Simon