I have just been hired to this company and they have assigned me to repair some of their defective modules. The modules are BL651 with what I believe to be nrf52810 processor. I have one module that works with the software they originally installed which I am keeping as my reference. For some of my damaged boards, I had to replace the BL651 because of various problems, one had no clock, another was pulling far too much current crashing the 2032 battery and another had a solder bridge somewhere under the module. The previous person who assembled these wasn't very good at soldering SMD.
I have spent many hours trying to figure out how to program these things using a somewhat confusing document they had written. Now I have come to the point where I can program our new boards however when debugging, they run and lockup when the BLE routine is called. All 3 of these new boards. Commenting that line allows the program to run perfectly. Testing my functional board, it runs perfectly. I have verified the old software with the new one and they are identical. I then reprogrammed this reference with the software, and it still works.
I assume my installation is good seeing as all 3 modules block at the same step and have otherwise fixed their original problems. The programmer is a dev board with PCA10040 2.1.0.
I suspect a non-volatile register that holds the configuration of the BLE soft device to be set by default at disable, which makes sense seeing as this soft device drains much current and you don't want a newbie to these chips to freak out at the current drain. Speaking of which the current on my reference board is 100mA which I think is way too high but I am still keeping it that way because it doesn't seem to bother any other functionality so I can still use it as a reference.
All weekend I have been searching the multitude of videos and documents from Nordic and everything I have tried works. I can't even get blinky to work. I have tried Segger, Keil, and GCC and none can recognize the ".en" extension on the sample files. I am probably being a bit stupid about that, but I am very tired.
Please someone help me with my BLE problem and/or my example blinky software so I can create small programs that will test out everything individually. These short programs will serve to validate future modules' functionality and help debug future problems. I especially want to get the heartbeat sample working to use its foundation with my program.
thanks, Bruno
PS, I have 40yrs of microcontrollers under my belt and these ones are the most complicated ones I have ever encountered
