nRF9160 asset tracker support

[Damion]

Good day.

We have a customer that asked us the following questions about the nRF9160 asset tracker application and we're hoping that you can help. 

1. What tools are available for looking at the threads as part of debugging. 

2. How to make this low power if not already.

3. learn about the 'state of readiness' for a commercial application. Is this code qualified in any way (I don't want to have to start debugging OS issues while in the field) or will we have to write everything from scratch?

Regards 

Damion 

[Didrik Rokhaug]

Hi.

 

1. What tools are available for looking at the threads as part of debugging. 

OpenOCD and PyOCD should be able to provide thread awareness to GDB, though I have not tried this myself. A quick search in our documentation gives this:

https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF_Connect_SDK/doc/1.2.0/zephyr/application/index.html#rtos-awareness

https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF_Connect_SDK/doc/1.2.0/zephyr/guides/debugging/host-tools.html#openocd-debug-host-tools

You might be able to find other guides if you search the internet for "Zephyr thread aware debugging" or similar. Any guide that works for Zephyr  should also work for NCS.

 

2. How to make this low power if not already.

 The asset_tracker application already has some power optimizations. But, you can enable more. See https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF_Connect_SDK/doc/1.2.0/nrf/applications/asset_tracker/README.html#power-optimization

 

3. learn about the 'state of readiness' for a commercial application. Is this code qualified in any way (I don't want to have to start debugging OS issues while in the field) or will we have to write everything from scratch?

I am not 100% certain I understand exactly what you are asking about here, but I'll try to answer.

The NCS is considered "production ready" for the nRF9160. The asset_tracker has also existed for a (relatively) long time, and has been extensively tested as well.

Zephyr itself also has a long history. Even though the Zephyr project is relatively new compared to other RTOSes, it is based on previous RTOSes with a long history.

Best regards,

Didrik