Hi Folks,
I’v been using Zephyr for about a year and I’m comfortable with updating devices with mcumgr over serial and bluetooth. I ship apps with Zephyr.


I’ve been itching to try out the 9160 that I snapped up in the first groupgets round, and I have just the project for it, but I just cannot get the 9160 feather to successfully complete an image upload. I should be using the newtmgr binary from here right?

Most often it dies uploading blinky at 97.3% (which would be about on the 64k mark, is that relevant?), but sometimes it dies around 10 or 20% complete.

I’ve never had a successful upload.

I’ve completely blown away and reinstalled my SDK following the instructions (I’m on nfed rev e8e4ddbba65ad055513d1cf8a76d573569337e94).

I’ve tried this on my Macbook (where I do all my zephyr coding, and on two different linux PCs). I’ve tried many different USB cables.

I don’t have a TagConnect cable, though I have several j-link and st-link boards programmers, and not afraid of jury-rigging a programming cable.

Can anyone suggest what I should try next? (Yeah, I’ll order a tag-connect cable, but I’m in Australia and there’s a huge inbound cargo backlog)

Grateful for your suggestions, –chris

    Hey unixbigot

    Sorry for the trouble with newtmgr. One thing I will say is that the V1 bootloader is not compatible with newer versions of the NCS. You may need to re-program the device to turn on that functionality.

    I’ve attached the factory firmware that comes with the V2 hardware. It should work on V1 except for the accelerometer capabilities.

    https://community.jaredwolff.com/assets/files/2021-03-19/1616166994-650001-v2-010421-1502-mergedhex.zip

    As long as your programmer supports M33 processors, it should be able to program the nRF9160.

      13 days later

      Thanks, jaredwolff.

      OK, so I soldered up a bogo-cable to the SWD pins. Now my next problem was that I get “the connected JLink does not support the ARMv8M”.

      So, I digs me out an ST-Link and the fork of openOCD with nrf9160 support.

      And glory, be, after a wee bit of messing about (changing the chip ID in the target file for some reason), I get blinky blinking:

      chris@auric scripts % sudo ../bin/openocd -f interface/stlink.cfg -f target/nrf9160.cfg -c init -c 'program /opt/nordic/ncs/v1.5.0/zephyr/samples/basic/blinky/build/zephyr/merged.hex verify reset exit'
      Open On-Chip Debugger 0.10.0+dev-00923-g5c215b7a (2019-06-29-00:22)
      Licensed under GNU GPL v2
      For bug reports, read
      	http://openocd.org/doc/doxygen/bugs.html
      Info : auto-selecting first available session transport "hla_swd". To override use 'transport select <transport>'.
      Info : The selected transport took over low-level target control. The results might differ compared to plain JTAG/SWD
      Info : clock speed 1000 kHz
      Info : STLINK V2J29S7 (API v2) VID:PID 0483:3748
      Info : Target voltage: 3.190607
      Info : nrf9160.cpu: hardware has 8 breakpoints, 4 watchpoints
      Info : Listening on port 3333 for gdb connections
      target halted due to debug-request, current mode: Thread 
      xPSR: 0xf9000000 pc: 0x00002d60 msp: 0x20006060
      ** Programming Started **
      Info : device: nRF9120
      Info : Flash write discontinued at 0x00008000, next section at 0x0000c000
      Warn : using fast async flash loader. This is currently supported
      Warn : only with ST-Link and CMSIS-DAP. If you have issues, add
      Warn : "set WORKAREASIZE 0" before sourcing nrf51.cfg/nrf52.cfg to disable it
      Warn : using fast async flash loader. This is currently supported
      Warn : only with ST-Link and CMSIS-DAP. If you have issues, add
      Warn : "set WORKAREASIZE 0" before sourcing nrf51.cfg/nrf52.cfg to disable it
      ** Programming Finished **
      ** Verify Started **
      ** Verified OK **
      ** Resetting Target **
      shutdown command invoked

      Next problem, how to install a fresh bootloader. I shall hie me away and try to find some info on how to do that.

      (Is it just plan ol’ compile-and-install mcuboot, because that I can do)

        unixbigot awesome. If you downloaded and flashed the image I sent you that includes the latest bootloader. So you should be set!

          nRF5340-DK, the best $50 Jlink programmer for Nordic devices and rock solid for running examples of Zephyr code and add a TC2030-NL probe, to make life a little easier. Makes using the nRF programming tools painless other than the learning curve.

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