Connectivity FW on nRF52840 Dongle with PA/LNA

[chulseung.yoo]

I am connecting to the ble device from the PC through pc-ble-driver-js.

There, I am using the nrf52840 dongle with Connectivity firmware, and the wireless performance of this dongle is not good.

I found the following product and tried it, and it was confirmed that PA/LNA works on the default firmware.

The circuit diagram of the product is as follows.

http://www.holyiot.com/tp/2021091017064271075.pdf

The pc-ble-driver nRF52840 Dongle firmware is built by following the firmware build guide at pc-ble-driver.

In this guide, the nRF5 SDK version 15 repository is downloaded internally and built after applying the git patch.

the internal git repository with git patched was stored separately and opened with SES and built, and I checked that it was possible to use it with nrf connect ble app

The problem is that the PA/LNA function is not properly added in pc-ble-driver FW for nRF52840 dongle.

I tried applying it referring to the contents of the two threads

pa-lna-support-in-s132

pa-lna-in-a-serialized-application

but an error message of 0x3001 is being output as the return value of sd_ble_opt_set.

Does anyone know what part is the problem?

thanks!

[Simonr]

Hi

The pc-ble-driver is based on an older SoftDevice version I'm afraid, so PA/LNAs aren't supported for the pc-ble-driver. Since you're trying to add it yourself I guess you are moving somewhere, but I see that you have tagged this case as S132 and link to an S132 case. The SoftDevice supproted by the nRF52840 is only the S140 SoftDevice, so if you're not using this already, try moving to S140 instead of S132.

Best regards,

Simon

[chulseung.yoo]

https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/pc-ble-driver-js/issues/187

According to this link, pc-ble-driver says there is no support for v6 softdevice. v5 is the latest. And s140 was supposed to be supported in v6. By the way, luckily, there was a project that made the s132 softdevice v5 version compatible with the nRF52840. Among the examples of the patched version of the nRF5 SDK version 15 that I described, it is in the following path.
/examples/connectivity/ble_connectivity/pca10056/ser_s132v5_usb_hci
When the project is opened in Segger Embedded Studio and built and downloaded to nRF52840 Dongle, it works properly as a dongle adapter of pc-ble-driver. Even though it's an s132 soft device. So I'm starting with this project and trying to apply PA/LNA features to it.