Possible reasons for BLE suddenly not working?

[pctj101]

I have a custom board that is running the NRF52832 from the Redbear MB-N2 Module.

Suddenly the board will not BLE advertise. I loaded the HRM example and that won't advertise either.

Then I loaded the same files on another 2 boards (1 custom, 1 redbear blend2) and the same binary successfully advertises on BLE.

Is there a chance I "burnt out" the BLE transmission ability of the NRF52? Anything I should check?

[Petter Myhre]

Burnt out? What do you mean? Did you remember to flash the SoftDevice? Have you tried to debug? Have you tried an application that doesn't use a SoftDevice? Does it work? Blinky for example?

[pctj101]

Hi Petter, Thanks for asking some follow on questions.

I believe the softdevice is properly in place for 2 basic reasons:

1. I mergehex the softdevice into the hex file so it's impossible to forget
2. The same hex file on a different board successfully does BLE advertisement

The remainder of my application works just fine. I2C, UART, GPIO letc. So the board is at least largely alive. :)

[Petter Myhre]

Then I would recommend doing some debugging, either with a debugger or printfs. Are you even entering main? Do you get any errors that could cause a reset? Are you even getting to/past advertising_start()?

[pctj101]

Hi Petter,

Entering main() - Yes! No issue

Errors causing reset - Probably not. I have a serial console monitoring the system and there are no resets.

Regarding advertising_start, let me get back to you.

[pctj101]

Thanks all for attempting to provide insight. I came back to this today to find another board was being enumerated by iOS with a "blank" name. So even though the device was detected, the name was blank, so I didn't realize the device was enumerated.

Subsequent reflash of the same program seems to have cleared this up, but I suspect there's some iOS cache issue involved here more so than a strange soft-device interaction.