TS MK II – Mesh Network Pt.2

As part of my Temperature Sensor upgrade, I’ve started looking into Mesh Networking support.

Documenting my progress

Rather than try and put a post together at the end, I’m going to try and document my progress as I go, with additions to this post each time I do something significant.

The beginning

I recommend you read the first post before picking up here.

31th July

I carried on through the developer study guy and implemented the basic Light. The messaging flow is now making sense to me. I knew the Microbit’s 16KB of RAM wasn’t going to be enough for any real project, so I decided to bite the bulled and pick up a Adafruit nRF52832 device.

Ordered from www.coolcomponents.co.uk, they arrived pretty quickly. I plugged it in, downloaded the Bluefruit app from the app store and was able to discover and connect to the device pretty quickly. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t flash it my Zephyr project. More digging around, using the Nordic Tools and I discovered that the West tool couldn’t detect the device. Strange, as I could flash it with simple Arduino sketches. I trawled the documentation. Tried changing drivers. Updated the bootloader. Nothing had any effect.

During the umpteenth reading of the Zephyr docs, I finally realised why:

Flashing Zephyr onto the nrf52_adafruit_feather board requires an external J-Link programmer. The programmer is attached to the X1 SWD header.

https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/arm/nrf52_adafruit_feather/doc/index.html

I have emphasized external in the quote above. I totally missed that key piece of information. More googling and I learn that Segger J-Link is a special protocol and that a small unit is required to interface your computer with the board! Everything fell into the place. The different drivers and the talk of the SWD header.

Unfortunately, my Adafruit boards don’t have a SWD header. Fortunately, the board has space and solder pads for one to be added.

Adafruit sell the headers, but nobody in the UK had them available. I searched around and found something on RS that looked right.

I found a J-LINK device on The PiHut which I ordered, along with a short cable. I’ll wait for that to arrive before I attempt to solder this header onto the board. I’m going to need some steady hands!!

3rd August

J-Link Device arrived and connected up. Managed to solder on the header without any issue.

I think hooked up my newly purchased J-LINK device. Side node here – I ordered a serial cable with this as PiHut said it was recommended. One came in the box, so the extra one I ordered was redundant! I’ll be writing to them about that.

Running the nordic command shows it has found the J-LINK connector!

Sadly, nothing is easy…

My attempt to flash the hello_world sample failed. Ah man – with some help from this https://embeddedcomputing.weebly.com/segger-j-link-with-adafruit-feather-nrf52.html I realised I had the cable connected the wrong way around. I could find no information on the orientation of the header or cable, but I reversed it based on that pic and boom…..

SUCCESS!

It appeared that I had successfully flashed the device with the sample code.

Bloomin’ heck. It did actually work!

With the flash process *finally* working, I create a new “light” project, using what I’d learned from the BBC Microbit. I was then able to reuse the BBC Microbit switch.

I’d consider that a success! I think I’ve enough of a basic grasp of BLE Mesh networking to park this part of the project and move on!