nrf_fstorage_erase returns invalid address error

[Coz]

Hello,

I've been working on the ble_multilink example and managed to combine that with the ble_hrs_c example to connect to multiple heart rate units and receive the data through UART. Instead of searching for specific pre-defined UUIDs I would like to enable the flash storage functionality so that a user can send specific UUIDs to the device, through the Android app, and store them in the flash storage. After that I would like the device to connect to the different devices which are advertising the UUIDs that have been stored in flash.

At the moment i have enabled the flash storage and can successfully store the first UUID, but when I try to store the second one an Invalid Address error is thrown when trying to erase the next storage space before writing the second UUID. Through some research online I found that this error is thrown when the data that will be written or the memory address are not word aligned. Hence I made sure both of those values are word aligned but that did not seem to fix the problem.

I'm not entirely sure what where exactly this is going wrong but I'm assuming its throwing the error here (in the nrf_fstorage.c nrf_fstorage_erase() function):

/* Address must be aligned to a page boundary. */
if (    ((page_addr & (p_fs->p_flash_info->erase_unit - 1)) != 0)
    ||  !addr_within_bounds(p_fs, page_addr, (len * p_fs->p_flash_info->erase_unit)))
{
    return NRF_ERROR_INVALID_ADDR;
}

I created separate files for all the fstorage functions for better readability and these are the fs_utils.h and fs_utils.c. The part of the code which im trying to store the data is shown here (this is the data handler for my custom service for sending data through the phone app):

extern volatile uint32_t finished_storing_uuids;														/**< Flag for determining whether all the UUIDs have been stored. */	
extern volatile uint32_t is_busy;																						/**< External global flag used for waiting for asynchronous events. */
extern volatile uint32_t search_in_flash;																		/**< Global flag used for determining whether to search in flash for the peer UUIDs. */
volatile uint32_t store_address = SENSOR_UUID_ADDRESS;											/**< Index for last address that a UUID has been stored in. */

void pcs_data_handler(ble_pcs_t * p_pcs, uint8_t const * p_data){ ret_code_t err_code;
uint16_t data_to_store = 0;
uint16_t retrieved_data = 1;

if (!is_busy)
{
	if ((p_data[0] << 8 | p_data[1]) != 0x0000)
	{
		search_in_flash = 1;
		if (store_address != FS_END_ADDRESS)
		{
			data_to_store = p_data[0] << 8 | p_data[1];
			retrieved_data = fs_read_uuid(store_address);
			if (retrieved_data != NULL)
			{
				NRF_LOG_INFO("Address to store to: %d", store_address);
				
				err_code = fs_write_uuid(store_address, data_to_store);
				APP_ERROR_CHECK(err_code);
				
				if ((err_code != NRF_SUCCESS) && (err_code != NRF_ERROR_BUSY))
				{
					NRF_LOG_ERROR("Failed storing UUID in flash. Error 0x%x. ", err_code);
				}
				else
				{
					store_address = store_address + 4;
					NRF_LOG_INFO("Address after store: %d", store_address);
				}
			}
		}
		else
		{
			NRF_LOG_ERROR("Flash storage is full");
		}
	}
	else
	{
		finished_storing_uuids = 1;
	}
}}

I'm sorry if my explanation is a bit of a mess. Please let me know if you would like more information regarding my project because I'm not sure I included all the information there.

Also I'm using a nrf52832 PCA10040 s132 dev board with SDK 14.0.0.

[emdi]

It seems you are trying to do an erase operation beginning from an address that is not aligned to a page boundary.

Could you check what are the values of p_fs->p_flash_info and page_addr?

emdi

[Coz]

Yeah, it seems that way. Although I'm not entirely sure where this un-alignment is happening, because I think the addresses and pages I'm providing to the function have all been aligned.

The information you asked for, right before the system returns the error is:

p_fs->p_flash_info = 0x00031920 (&m_flash_info), page_addr = 0x007F004

[Coz]

I've figured out the problem and it was an error on my behalf because i didn't fully understand how the fstorage system worked. Because I only want to use one page in flash I should only be erasing that one page and not fiddle around with the other pages unless I am planning on writing to those pages. The problem was that I was providing an address to the erase function which was an address inside the page I was using. This meant that it wasn't the address of the next page hence it was not at the page boundary. I fixed the problem by always providing the address of the first page to the nrf_fstorage_erase() function.

[emdi]

Hi, 0x007F004 is not aligned to a page boundary. 0x007F000 is. Erase operations should be aligned to a page boundary. Try starting the erase at 0x007F000.

Regards, emdi