NRF52840-DK

[jeepermf1949]

I received my NRF52840-DK board, today, from Digi-key.  I followed directions in starting it up - power set to USB, switch to on.  When I turn it on, all LEDs flash and pressing buttons does not affect this.  Also, the BLE does not advertised itself.

Have I received a damaged board, or is there something I can do to "wake it up"?

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi Michael,

I cannot say for sure if you have a damaged board or not, but based on what you write it seems more like a matter of which firmware is on it. You should have been able to control the LEDs via the buttons with the firmware the DK ships with, but something might have happened. Which version of the DK do you have - it is printed on a white sticker? I ask in case there was a batch which was programmed with a different firmware in production. By the way, which pattern does the LEDs blink in? That could help to see what firmware it uses.

Regarding Bluetooth, the DK does not ship with firmware that is Bluetooth enabled, so you need to program that yourself. You can for instance use the Heart rate monitor from here, or another example firmware from the SDK.

Einar

[jeepermf1949]

The label on the board says:

PVA10056

3.0.0

2022.7

1050291511

The LEDs are not showing any pattern but all blinking very rapidly and appear to be parallel, but hard to tell because of the speed of the blinking.

Your startup procedures say to load the App to the phone which contains the heartbeat function.  The function requires pairing Bluetooth, which obviously requires the board to be enabling and advertising Bluetooth.

[Einar Thorsrud]

jeepermf1949 said:

Your startup procedures say to load the App to the phone which contains the heartbeat function.  The function requires pairing Bluetooth, which obviously requires the board to be enabling and advertising Bluetooth.

Yes, that is correct. But a key part is that is explains that you need to download the Heart rate monitor. That links to the download page where you find the nrf52840-dk-hrm_demo.zip file. (There is no firmware that use bluetooth on the board form the factory so programming relevant firmware is absolutely required.)

[jeepermf1949]

How do you download something to a board in which no vehicle has been defined for communicating to the board, other than the app which requires the board to advertise BLE?

[Einar Thorsrud]

The DK has an onboard debugger, so you plug in the USB cable to the micro USB port on the left side and program via SWD. There are many ways to do this, but I suggest you use nRF Connect for Desktop with the Programmer app.