Hi,

Last week, randomly after flashing the nRF board with our code, the blue LED on the feather won’t turn off. I have tried many methods to turn off the LED but can’t seem to find any fixes.

Details
I recently purchased a nRF9160 Feather board (V5) and it has been working very well using both the nfed samples and also creating my own applications from the nRF SDK’s AWS-IoT samples.

I typically place the board into bootloader mode physically (pressing the buttons), but sometimes use the zephyr tools command. Putting the device into bootloader still works using both method. I can’t physically tell it’s in bootloader since the blue LED is always on, however, I can tell by code not uploading to the board.

Things I have done to try turn the blue led off.

  1. Reset the board with the reset button.
  2. Reset the board using zephyr-tools.
  3. Flash a new nRF Modem firmware on the board.
  4. Flash a blinky example (and variations of) from the nfed sample.
  5. Create a simple application that sends the LED pin to both LOW and HIGH (neither work).
  6. Power the board off battery only.
  7. Upload random examples from different SDKs (e.g. circuit dojo’s repo and nrf’s SDK) that shouldn’t require the blue LED to be on.

Despite trying all the above, the blue LED won’t seem to turn off. There seems to be no physical damage or shorts to the board.

The device overlay files from the original circuit dojo repo haven’t been altered in anyway. I did play around with the device overlay files for my own custom applications.

Attachments
Wasn’t sure what files/code to attach since it’s not a specific code issue. Happy to send through any debugging logs or code.

Apologies if this is a very simple fix. I am new to the embedded software space and have been learning about it over the last few weeks. I appreciate in advance any help!

    callumctaylor

    Did you reprogram the bootloader?

    Otherwise sounds like the sample you’re using is setting that particular GPIO? In any case the polarity changed between versions. If you pop this into boards/circuitdojo_feather_nrf9160_ns.overlay you should be all set:

    / {
	leds {
		compatible = "gpio-leds";
		blue_led: led_0 {
			gpios = <&gpio0 3 GPIO_ACTIVE_HIGH>;
			label = "Blue LED (D7)";
		};
	};
};

        jaredwolff
        There is a possibility I might have accidentally reprogrammed the bootloader when trying to get some new code uploaded. Is there a way I can tell or reset the bootloader?

        I put your code into zephyr/boards/arm/circuitdojo_feather_nrf9160/circuitdojo_feather_nrf9160_common.dts but unfortunately it didn’t fix it. I am running the blinky script in the nfed example with no changes to the repository (the custom code is in another nrf SDK repository).

          For more context, here is a link including the board file and the blinky code. I have tried both building with and without the overlay files under the boards local folder.
          https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17VkunLY96AmJtrP5PgWmSPRF5WfpijgP?usp=sharing

          The blue LED still won’t turn off. I think I’ll remove the LED for now since there doesn’t seem to be any other bugs with the board and I need it to operate under low power.

          If you have any hard reset options for the bootloader or anything else, please let me know. I only have an nrf53 DK.

          If you overwrote the bootloader, you need to apply this overlay to the bootloader. Add that entry to your_app/child_image/mcuboot/boards/circuitdojo_feather_nrf9160.overlay, compile and flash.

          Thanks for your help. I think I might be a physical issue since we have another board running the same code that doesn’t have the same issue.

          We’ll order another set of boards and let you know if the issue pops up again.

          Cheers for the help!

          Sounds good.

          One other thing to check: the LED is a shared pin. If you have anything connected to D7 (P0.03) it will affect the operation of the LED.

          Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy