This weekend and the beginning of this week I worked with Benjamin on the nRF51 chip, we mostly worked on having a working UART while still being able to use the BLE (which wasn’t a piece of cake as we cannot do multithreading with Nordic’s software). So we had to use interrupts, we were later really pissed of as we realized we had a working code which didn’t throw any errors even though we didn’t observe any communication with minicom, until Benjamin realized that we forgot to put a pull down resistor on the CTS pin …
Today I did some research on the BLE when I discovered (rather lately to my taste), Nordic’s application notes which were much more clearer than the source code. I managed to understand how to do simple advertising so that I could deal with the altitude issue (with one altimeter advertising its altitude).
And as you have been very nice here is a picture of Benjamin’s and I working station (as you can see we are ready to kick some asses) :
I then debugged the LED strip code and it is now functional with SPI (damn you hardware bug).
If you don’t use hardware flow control, you are not supposed to activate the pulldown on CTS.
Sadly it doesn’t work without if we don’t. Probably a PCA10001/nrf518122 specific issue.