mergehex with s310v1 and .bin generation

[Vito]

Hi, I need a .bin file of the whole flash memory for production programming. The procedure I have used until now (with s310v2) was the following:

1. Upload .hex file of firmware with nrfgo;
2. Upload .hex file of softdevice with nrfgo;
3. Download the whole memory in a .hex file with nrfjprog;
4. Convert the .hex file to a .bin with hex2bin.

Now it happens that s310v1 has readback protection enabled (s310v2 doesn't have that). So reading back the flash memory is not possible. I have tried the following solutions, with bad results:

• Using mergehex for generating a unique .hex file to convert in .bin -> hex2bin complains about "overlapped records" (probably the UICR registers?), and the generated .bin file doesn't work as expected (infinite reboots)
• Trying to tweak the softdevice .hex file by removing the definition in the 0x10001000 and 0x10000010 addresses (s310v2 leaves those addresses untouched) -> firmware doesn't work as expected, nrfgo complains about softdevice
• Trying to download a .bin image with segger Jlink tool -> generates a .bin file which doesn't work when downloaded again to the flash memory

Is there another workaround for this problem?

[Nguyen Hoan Hoang]

How about this alternative here. No mergehex, no hex2bin require. Parallel programming multiple devices.

[Vito]

Thanks. Actually I made the long story short losing some details. The chips are already mounted on the boards, which are equipped with another microcontroller. The nrf51422 get its firmware (and updates) from the main uC, which gets it over the air. The main uC has a custom SWD script able to flash the nrf51422, and it always worked fine (but it works with .bin format).

[RK]

You can use objcopy, the standard binutils utility, with the --remove-section (-R). --gap-fill and --pad-to to make 3 separate bin files, one from 0x00000000 to 0x1FFFF, 1 byte before the start of program code with the first 2 sections in the softdevice hex file (ie remove section 3), a file from from 0x20000 to 0x10000FFF with the program code, and one from 0x10001000 to 0x10001018 with the third section of the softdevice (ie remove sections 1 and 2). Then you just cat them together and you have one long bin file you can use.

I believe the sections are called '.sec1' and '.sec2' and '.sec3'

The first piece for instance would look like this

objcopy -Iihex -Obinary -R .sec3 --gap-fill=0xff --pad-to=0x20000 s310_nrf51422_1.0.0_softdevice.hex s310_nrf51422_1.0.0_softdevice.1.bin

the rest are similar

[testy]

1. Segger J-Flash offers merge too (Open data file, Merge data file, Save data file as... bin)
2. S310 v1.0.0 won't run without readback protect (NRF_ERROR_SOFTDEVICE_NOT_ENABLED failure when sd_softdevice_enable is called)
3. merged bin file (containing UICR) will be about 256MB...

[Vito]

Thanks. Indeed I didn't realize that joining in a .bin file addresses so far from each other was not a good idea. I'll just enable the readback protection after flashing the code memory area.