SD140 6.0.0-6-alpha BLE issues

[Julie H]

Greetings -

I recently downloaded the latest SD140 images, 6.0.0-6-alpha, and began having issues with BLE communication.

I'm developing a custom device, based on the nRF52840, and we require both BLE and USB communication. The USB peripheral seems to be pretty much broken when the Soft Device is enabled, so I'm going to ignore that for the moment.

I recently migrated our code from the previous Soft Device, 5.0.0-5-alpha, which had working BLE (NUS and other services). When I attempted to discover and connect to the device using nRF Toolbox, I was unsuccessful. I reverted my code to the last working, pre-USB version, to remove any possible USB issues. This didn't resolve the problem. The only way to get BLE working again was to switch back to the 5.0.0-5-alpha version of the Soft Device.

[endnode]

Maybe stupid question but just to be sure: you've replaced header files in your toolchain (e.g. in respective SDK folder) to match new SD API? Any conflicts to resolve? Have you also reviewed all the suggested changes from migration document issued with new SD? And finally is your app on top of new stack at lest alive in terms of UART/RTT logging, advertising etc.? Where exactly it breaks in terms of connection?

[Julie H]

Would someone please confirm that there are NO SDK differences between S140-5.0.0-5-alpha (what we had) and S140-6.0.0-6-alpha? I am on SDK 13.1, which supposedly supports S140 and there is no new release of SDK 13.1. And 14.0 / 14.1 is a bridge too far at this time.

[endnode]

The idea is that SDK and SD versions should be to certain extend independent. So each SDK is issued with certain SD set but you can any time upgrade/downgrade SDK API by using different set of header files and of course correcting ROM/RAM memory regions where applicable. Yes, there might be some problems if you use SDK modules/libs which use SD API (typically they take care about certain BLE functions to provide more high-level API for app developers who cannot or don't want to deal with the actual BLE stack layers) but I've in the past switched SD independently on SDK many times successfully.

[endnode]

Btw. I wanted to run API packs through KDiff3 but where you got S140 V5.0.0-aplha.5? I see only alpha.3 in both compatibility matrix and Nordicsemi download pages...

[Julie H]

I'm familiar with the concept - I wrote operating systems for about 20 years. I was more expressing my disbelief that a soft device update would be required which came along with a requirement that I change / upgrade my SDK AND there was no SDK update to upgrade to. As for the migration, there was no migration document for going from S140-5.0.0-5alpha to S140-6.0.0-6-alpha.