Is NRF Beacon Kit compatible with S130?

[Daniel]

Hello, I have looked into the compatibility matrix and I couldn't find any clear answer about if the NRF Beacon Kit is compatible or not with the S130.

Does anyone tried to flash that softdevice using the NRF51 DK kit and a wired adapter or using DFU? If it helps, my beacons are PCA20006 Rev 1.1.0 2015.06. I don't know if there is any other way to identify them.

Thank you very much.

[Stefan Birnir Sverrisson]

Hi Daniel

Thanks for your question. You are correct, this information is unfortunately not clear enough in current official documentation.

The table on this thread shows what nRF51 revision, what softdevice and what firmware is present on each version of the beacon kit. Your beacon board apparently has second revision IC, which according to the compatibility matrix is not compatible with the S130 softdevice. If you would have beacon kit v1.2.0, then you could flash and use the S130 softdevice on the beacon kit. However, you need a programmer and an adapter cable to do it. It can not be done over the air.

It would be better though to use Beacon kit v1.3.0 as it has 32kB RAM with the nRF51 CFAC variant on board, while former boards have 16kB RAM variants. That is because the S130 uses 10kB of RAM, so there is not much left for bootloader and application. If you however intend to use a simple beacon as application, 4kB might be sufficient.

You can flash a new softdevice + bootloader + application as shown on this thread when you have connected a programmer to the beacon kit.