nRF52 DK PCA10040 BLE unable to establish a connection

[Sam]

Hi, I have been developing with the nRF52 DK for the past couple of months however I have encountered an issue today which I am unable to resolve.

I am unable to establish a BLE connection, at first I attributed the problem to my code however after flashing some of th examples the issue still persists. The device is advertising however a connection cannot be established. I have been using the nRF Toolbox app, the device appears in the scan but once selected rapidly disconnects. When interrogating the device using LightBlue LED1 flashes eratically.

I have erased the device using nRFgo studio and reflashed the softdevice several times. Non-BLE examples work fine, I have verified the board operation using the bsp example and a UART connection.

Any suggestions regarding what else I could try? Perhaps it is a hardware problem?

[Sam]

Is it possible that I've unintentionally put the radio peripheral into a non-connectable state? I've been searching and came across this post.

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated - this work forms my final year project at University which is due in a matter of weeks!

Thanks, Sam

[Stefan Birnir Sverrisson]

Hi Sam

Perhaps the problem is on the phone side. Try resetting the phone and try again. That will surely erase all cache GATT tables from the phone and reset the Bluetooth hardware. Usually it works also to go to bluetooth settings, forget all bonded devices and/or disable bluetooth and enable it again. The last approach is though to reset the phone if nothing else works.

[Sam]

Unfortunately I don't think the issue lies on the phone side, I have installed the nRF toolbox on another phone which has never previously been used with the device and the same issue persists.

[Stefan Birnir Sverrisson]

Can you tell me what PCA10040 version you have? What SDK version are you using and what softdevice? Are you following the compatibility recommendation of the nRF52 compatibility matrix?

[Sam]

I am using PCA10040 V0.9.0, SDK nRF5_SDK_11.0.0-2.alpha_bc3f6a0 and softdevice: s132_nrf52_2.0.0-7.alpha_softdevice. My board previously worked with this configuration and I believe I am following the compatibility matrix