nRF52840 ZigBee examples keep rebooting with ZBOSS Error

[bmangodt]

Hi everyone.

I am trying to develop our first Zigbee device with a Nordic nRF52840 Dev kit. However, I cannot seem to get past the "hello-world" stage.
I want to flash a example project first before diving into the development to get more familiar with the environment.
Here are the steps I followed:

• Installed nRF Connect for Desktop v3.11.1
• Installed Toolchain Manager and nRF Connect SDK v2.0.0 (latest according to Toolchain Manager)
• All dependencies and plugins are installed on VSCode and I am able to compile and flash.
• I have created a new project (freestanding) with the example Zigbee/light_switch, zigbee/light_bulb and zigbee/template (all have the same error.)

When the board boots up, all seem to work okay. However, when looking at the serial interface I can see that the board keeps on rebooting with the message "ZBOSS Fatal Error Occured". Next, I enabled some debugging options so I can see the stack trace and I get the following message: "Illegal use of the EPSR"

Googling doesn't seem to give me any answers. As a last resort I tried downgrading the Connect SDK to v1.9.1 but it gives me the same result...

Can anyone help me or point me in the right direction (expansive tutorial maybe)?

Thanks in advance.

[Marte Myrvold]

Hi,

Have you made any changes to the samples or any other files in the SDK? Do you get Illegal use of EPSR with samples that are not Zigbee as well?

Do you get any other logs from the device?

Best regards,

Marte

[bmangodt]

Hi Marte,

Thank you for your reply!

I did not make any changes to the samples. The only thing I did was enabling some more debugging logs in kconfig. I haven't tried any other examples except Zigbee.
However, I did make some progress with this issue myself.
I flashed the same .hex firmware file using the programmer in nRF Connect for Desktop on my own pcb with a Minew MS88SF2 module and it works just fine. 

When I looked closely at the Dev Kit we had lying around in the office, I noticed it was a Preview DK. So my best guess is that I was running into some compatibility issues (either hard- and/or software) with the pre-release devkit.

While we had it running, we were looking for a way to put the device in "pairing" mode so it could connect to our own Zigbee coordinator with a Silicon Labs EFR32MG SoC. From the example I can only make out an "identify" mode but that does not seem to be it as it has to be in a network already? Or does the implementation of the examples start from a pre-defined network it needs to join?

Thanks in advance!

Kind regards,

Beau

[Marte Myrvold]

Hi Beau,

That explains why it did not work, as the nRF52840 PDK is not supported in nRF Connect SDK. You will not be able to get Zigbee applications in nRF Connect SDK to work on the PDK, so I recommend getting a DK instead.

bmangodt said:

While we had it running, we were looking for a way to put the device in "pairing" mode so it could connect to our own Zigbee coordinator with a Silicon Labs EFR32MG SoC. From the example I can only make out an "identify" mode but that does not seem to be it as it has to be in a network already? Or does the implementation of the examples start from a pre-defined network it needs to join?

In the samples in our SDK the device will automatically start looking for a network to join on start up. For a device to join a new network the coordinator must open the network and commission the device. You can read more about commissioning in our documentation here: Zigbee commissioning.

Best regars,

Marte

[bmangodt]

Hi Marte,

Okay, good to know our PDK is not compatible. Guess we jumped a little too soon on the nRF52840...

I read the documentation that you sent and enabled the 'CONFIG_ZIGBEE_CHANNEL_SELECTION_MODE_MULTI' option in KConfig as per the instructions here. 
That does seem to do something, but my device running the light switch example still fails to pair. I want to pair this to Home Assistant running the Zigbee2MQTT addon because I am most comfortable in that environment and it would be nice to see it pop up there. I have included screenshots from the device logs over RTT and the debug logs from Z2M.

[Marte Myrvold]

Hi,

It would be useful to look at the packets that are being sent between the devices. Can you get a sniffer log of this and upload the log here as a pcap file? If you have an additional nRF52840 dongle or DK you can use nRF Sniffer for 802.15.4 for this. Please make sure to either start the sniffer before you start the coordinator so the sniffer has the network key, or share the network key with me so that I can decrypt the packets.

Best regards,

Marte