nrf51 unexpected advertising stop

[Carlos Sánchez]

Dear Developers,

I have some experience with nRF51422 QFAC series and I have the PC10028 pcb nrf51sdk environment.

Until now, I have developed some applications successfully but some days ago, I noticed an unexpected behaviour in the PC10028: It stops advertising suddenly.

In more detail, I flashed de SD v8.0 first and then my apps developed with sdk9.0. These apps worked very well, but, without any change, now the nrf51 stops advertising suddenly.

So, I decided go back to a solid point, and I erased the chip fully, flashed SD110 v8.0 and then ble_template (sdk 9.0). In the template, advertising has to stop after 180s, but the result is that it stops 2-3 seconds after the application started and the blinking flashes for a 2-3 seconds and then it freezes up ON.

I checked Vdd (2,97V, it is OK), reset pin (high state, ok!). It seems ok.

Any suggestions?

Thank you very much.

Kind Regards,

        Carlos

[MartinBL]

Hi

So to be clear: You are using SD 8 and flashing original SDK 9 examples, without changing them, and the board stops advertising after 2-3 seconds?

If you haven't already, can you please enable the debug feature in the SDK and see if you get any asserts in your code? Learn how in this link.

[Carlos Sánchez]

Hi Martin,

Yes, that is. At the moment, I have not enabled the debug mode yet. I am going to do it right now and I will report.

Thank you for your comment.

[Carlos Sánchez]

Hi Martin,

I enabled the debug mode in two projects: ble_template and ble_uart (the problem is reproducible in both projects)

I only got one message: "adv: advertising_fast_start" and nothing else.

During investigation, I found these examples (and my apps) ran successfully in other environment designed by our team.

So my hypothesys is, thus I has been using the nrf51 sdk for a long time, erasing flash and flashing it again, I think I have reached maximum erase-writing cycles. Have you ever experienced this?

On the other hand, what is the endurance life?

Thank you.

Carlos

[MartinBL]

Max read/write cycles are 20,000 so I doubt that you have reached the limit. Unless you have some custom code that does batch programming running over and over again? If you suspect that your flash is corrupted then maybe you can read out the content and compare it to the flash on a different device.