Unable to get BLE_Gateway from nRF51-ble-bcast-mesh working

[alexanderbrevig]

I've gotten two PCA10001 boards working with the LED_mesh sample.

I cannot get the third board to run BLE_Gateway (it does not react to button presses, nor is it discoverable with nRF Master Control Panel).

I'm using s110_nrf51822_7.1.0_softdevice.hex on the boards. I compile using Keil and I've set the Target IROM1 start to 0x16000 and I use nRFgo Studio to program both the SoftDevice and the application.

Anyone got any pointers? I feel like I'm sooo close to get a proof of concept done, and I'm only lacking the BLE Gateway.

Best regards

[alexanderbrevig]

I've tried to do a bit of debugging, and it seems I get stuck in error_loop from the HardFault_Handler. Any ideas what could cause this? I compile with nRF51 SDK v. 6.1.0.

I've tried to use v.7 but I'm unable to get it working with Keil.

Breakpoint in HardFault: http://i.imgur.com/7ae3mZh.png

Breakpoint in error_loop: http://i.imgur.com/WZTvozp.png

It seems to be the case that I can set a breakpoint before uint32_t error_code = sd_softdevice_enable(NRF_CLOCK_LFCLKSRC_XTAL_75_PPM, sd_assert_handler); but after this it hangs. I'm at loss...

[Trond Einar Snekvik]

Hi, The hardfault handler is usually called when you try to access some peripheral or data you're not allowed to. The Softdevice enforces several protected memory areas (including some peripherals), see the SD specification for details.

Are you able to step through the code with the debugger? You are probably accessing some blocked peripherals or similar, and we need to figure out when and which:) Are you able to initialize at all, or does it crash sometime in the init-phase? A stack trace would be the key to solve this.

Are you doing anything besides the example code stuff?

Trond

[alexanderbrevig]

Hi Trond! Thanks for getting back to me :) I'm not doing anything other than the example (except I've changed the define to be PCA10001).

I'll see if I can dump a stack trace today, I'm pretty sure the error happens in the init phase.

[alexanderbrevig]

I updated my 'answer' with more information.

[David Edwin]

Do you think you can switch to nRF51-DK board instead of the nRF51822 EK, there is more RAM in the device used in the nRF51 DK (i.e. 32K). The BLE gateway has been used in building the cloud interface, see this blog post https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/blogs/672/accessing-the-ble-mesh-via-the-spark-cloud/