How to restore nRFgo motherboard firmware

[Håkon Alseth]

This is an howto on restoring your nRFgo motherboard firmware.

Error code can be similar to this from nRFgo Studio:

Starting bootloader on board 0
Could not start the bootloader on the nRF6310
Please toggle power of board 0 to reset it

You could try to manually activate the bootloader feature of the Atmel on the motherboard. Here's the procedure:

1. Power-on the board, make sure the USB is connected to a PC.

2. Short P18 (between the extension board connectors).

3. Reset the AVR by shorting pin 5 and 6 on P14 (close to the crystal).

4. Remove both shorts. A USB device should enumerate now under name "Atmel DFU bootloader"

5. Open cmd.exe and cd "c:\your\path\to\nrfgo studio" (default: C:\Program Files (x86)\Nordic Semiconductor\nRFgo Studio) and run this command: dfu-programmer at90usb1287 flash hex\nRFgoFirmware_6701.hex

Now you should get "Validating...11212 bytes used (9.12%)"

Power cycle the motherboard and open nRFgo Studio and now it should work.

Note: If your board enumerates as "AT90USB127", then you'll have to manually upgrade the USB driver before running step 5. Point to the driver located in this folder: \Path\to\Nordic Semiconductor\nRFgo Studio\usb_drivers

[Anne van Rossum]

I just encounter this myself, straight from the package: "could not start the bootloader on the nrf6310", etc. At several places on this forum people are referred to this thread.

Is this supposed to be the normal procedure if you unbox the nRFgo?

[Håkon Alseth]

Hi Anne,

It is not a normal procedure. We have seen a very high spike regarding this issue in the last weeks, and we just found that this is a bug in nRFgo Studio. For now, the workaround is:

The solution is to either downgrade to 1.16.0 (https://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/nordic/Products/nRFgo-Studio/nRFgo-Studio-Win64/14964) and update, or run the update from cmd.exe: Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Nordic Semiconductor\nRFgo Studio and run: dfu-programmer.exe at90usb1287 flash hex/nRFgoFirmware_6701.hex

We're working on fixing this.

Best regards Håkon

[Anne van Rossum]

Perfect. The command line method worked fine!

[Ed]

I followed the above but was still not able to update the firmware.

When I jumper the pins and reset it, it showed up as "AT90USB128" but never has any "DFU" in the name. The "dfu-programmer..." command line produces "dfu-programmer: no device present".

I was, however, successful when I used the Atmel FLIP program, selected the 1287 device, and loaded the hex file with it, and programmed the motherboard.

It now shows the latest firmware is present. (ThIs was Win Vista x64)

[Håkon Alseth]

This was the old way of re-programming the board, using the flip-drivers. The workaround then is either to use AVR Flip, or upgrade the drivers as stated in the note in my initial post and proceed with the cmd-line calls.

-H