NRF52840 ipv6 communication with Raspberry Pi3 not working

[meetandyhere]

Hello,

I am trying a IOT SDK example to connect a NRF52840 to a Raspberry Pi 3 via ipv6: infocenter.nordicsemi.com/index.jsp

I don't use a low energy dongle because the Raspberry Pi 3 is already BLE enabled. I have already used it for other BLE applications.

On the NRF52840, I first programmed the SoftDevice s1xx-iot-prototype3_nrf52_softdevice.hex which is located at /components/softdevice/s1xx_iot/s1xx-iot-prototype3_nrf52_softdevice.hex in the SDK, followed by the IOT ICMP example located at \examples\iot\icmp\boards\pca10040\ in the SDK.

Although the documentation mentions using the S140 soft device, using it gave the following error when programming the actual ICMP example:

programming failed. This hex file has data in SoftDevice region. Try programming using "Program SoftDevice", or erase all before programming.

Also, even though the NRF52840 uses PCA10056, there were no examples available for that, so I used PCA10040.

After following the steps listed under infocenter.nordicsemi.com/index.jsp, under Getting Started --> Connecting devices to the router, I could see and connect to a "ICMPv6" BLE device and after performing the connection steps, the bt0 interfaces shows up.

However, when I try to ping the NRF52840 with ping6 and its local link ipv6 address (computed according to the Getting Started --> creating link local ipv6 addresses section, there is no response from the NRF52. ifconfig for bt0 shows the following traffic:

RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:15 errors:0 dropped:29 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:927 (927.0 B)

Could anyone help me out about what I might be doing wrong, and why I am not getting any response to ping6? Am I using the wrong program or the wrong SoftDevice? Is there something else I need to do for establishing communication?

Thanks in advance!

Regards

Andy

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Which OS are you running on the Raspberry? I tested this with the nRF52840 PDK and a Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspbian Stretch, and I'm not able to reproduce this issue. The IoT SDK does not have support for nRF52840 yet, but this will most likely be added in the next release.

[meetandyhere]

I am running Raspbian Jessie. The infocenter mentions the following requirement for the router: "this router must support Bluetooth low energy and 6LoWPAN over BLE". I know the Raspberry Pi that I'm using has BLE support, and I have enabled 6LoWPAN support. But do I require a 802.15.4 radio as well? Something like openlabs.co/.../Raspberry-Pi-802.15.4-radio Could you tell me what "support 6LoWPAN" would mean in the context of the Raspberry Pi?

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

You should not need a 802.15.4 radio as well. The 6LoWPAN protocol can run on multiple networks, including BLE and 802.15.4. You should be able to use the IoT SDK with Raspberry Pi 3 without any additional hardware, as it has integrated support for BLE. You can read more about the boarder router setup in the IoT SDK documentation.