Using the nRF52840 Dongle (PCA10059) as a USB serial-to-BLE port

[SteveHx]

I have already read thru past inquiries along this line, and I see that many others are trying to do the same thing, but Nordic is still not providing appropriate example code. My product (actual several products for several clients) needs to use the BLE UART capability to get data into a PC. The most obvious application of the Dongle is for just this purpose. I also see that others have thought of trying to merge the USB-serial example with the UART-central example, none successfully that I found. Will Nordic provide such an example?

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

There is an example in the SDK that is quite close to what you are describing, and that is the USBD BLE UART Example. This implements a BLE peripheral device and NUS server though, so you would have to modify it to be a NUS Client and a BLE central. You can refer to the Nordic UART Service Client for an example of that.

[WesC]

Einar.  we can close this.  I wrote a NUS Central with USB CDC for the dongle and the nrf52840 DK.  I spoke with Steve yesterday and gave him the code and got it working for him.  you can find the code 

github.com/.../usb_dongle

[Jeff4BLE]

Thanks

[SteveHx]

After a pause in this project, I am trying to resurrect it. I can compile the code and can use the nRF Connect Programmer applet to download the code to the dongle. It appears to download okay, but at the very end I get this:

2022-04-30T12:30:59.433Z INFO Uploading image through SDFU: 93%
2022-04-30T12:30:59.543Z INFO Uploading image through SDFU: 95%
2022-04-30T12:30:59.562Z INFO Uploading image through SDFU: 97%
2022-04-30T12:30:59.581Z INFO Uploading image through SDFU: 99%
2022-04-30T12:30:59.596Z INFO Uploading image through SDFU: 100%
2022-04-30T12:30:59.693Z INFO All dfu images have been written to the target device
2022-04-30T12:30:59.707Z DEBUG Will wait for device EF0F33B30A81
2022-04-30T12:31:02.708Z DEBUG Timeout when waiting for attachment of device with serial number EF0F33B30A81
2022-04-30T12:31:02.709Z ERROR Failed to write: Timeout while waiting for device  EF0F33B30A81 to be attached and enumerated

What am I missing? I get the same result on two different Dongles, so I doubt it's a hardware issue.

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

This log snippet shows that the programming was successful ("All dfu images have been written to the target device"). However, the project does not have the DFU trigger library so when the application is started (after completing DFU and resetting) nRF Connect Programmer will not find it, and therefor you get the error message. You can ignore this error. If you want to avoid it in the future, add the DFU trigger library to the project.

Einar