I know quiet a few readers of the blog are interested in the nRF51822, and use either the Blackmagic probe or OpenOCD to program your devices.
So I thought it worthwhile to share my experiences today, when I was unable to program a nRF51822QFAA device
To cut to the chase, the device identification in full is the nRF51822QFAAH1. This appears to be a new revision of the QFAA device (16k RAM 256k flash), which neither the Blackmagic probe or OpenOCD support, as its CONFIG ID code seems to be 0x008F where as the QFAAH0 is 0x0072
I will endeavor to update my Blackmagic probe repo as soon as I have confirmation via the Nordic developers forum that this indeed the case.
I’ve also logged a issue on the master Blackmagic probe repo, and will bring this to the attention of the OpenOCD team if confirmed.
In reality, the problem of not being able to program a specific board, has taken a while to quantify, as I had a batch of 40 boards to flash with custom firmware, and the first board I tried seemed to have this issue, so I ended up using a Jlink to flash the boards (which had its own issues, but thats another story).
Anyway, of the 40 brand new boards I received from a Chinese manufacturer, only 1 seems to contain this new device, so it was sod’s law that it was the first board that I attempted to program.
And doubly confusing, as I presumed the whole batch had the new device, so I didnt take note of which board would not initially program, So ended up having to retest all 40 again to find it, and confirm that all the other boards contained the QFAAH0 version.
But thats the way the cookie crumbles some days.
