First steps with custom boards

[stunt_man]

I was looking for something like a checklist of what to do when developing on a custom board but I couldn't find it.

I am working with Keil 5.15. I achieved to develop some code (focus on BLE communication) on nRF51822 Evaluation Kit. No problem with it. I just got it right.

Now, I have got my custom board design included a nRF51822 SoC. My first try was to get basic tutorials OK with this board (I just want my board to advertise).

For board support, I write my own header file to define the I/O pins I am using and update my compilation options to use it. I can program my board and flash it without problem. Unfortunately board is not advertising. I add a virtual COM port to debug, connect to it but was enable to get any message.

Using J-Link Commander, I can see that Cortex-M0 is identified. Voltage is at 1.783 V

I had a look in nRFGo Studio and my custom board is not detected. Is it the first thing to fix? How? What are the next common steps ?

[stunt_man]

Hi Martin,

Thank you for your reply. To explain a little bit more: everything works fine with Evaluation Kit, even debug mode and step by step debugging.

The programmer I use is a SEGGER J-LINK that detects my custom board as a CORTEX-M0.

Using Keil uVision, I can load my code on custom board. Unfortunately, when I try a debug session, I can not reach the first lines of code.

The code I use to check that everything is fine is really basic:

int main (void)
{
  int i = 0;
  i++;

  for (;;)
  {
    i++
  }
}

I will have a look on the whitepaper you mention. But this seems to be a different problem.