Troubleshooting RAK4631 Amazon Sidewalk Starter Kit Guide

I recently purchased the RAK Amazon Sidewalk Starter Kit US 915 Mhz 116091 while exploring development of DiY IoT devices. As a first step I really just wanted to try connecting to Sidewalk and logging simple sensor events such as motion from the PIR (RAK12006).

The thing I seem to struggling with most is registering my device with AWS Sidewalk. I am also getting confused about the appropriate firmware and steps to apply that.

I am mainly a Mac user but do have access to a Windows PC if needed. I am in the US with strong Sidewalk coverage although I’m not getting far enough along that coverage would be the issue.

Using the Arduino IDE I am able to load this simple example, “RAK12006_MotionDetection.ino”, and motion is detected based on the serial monitor.

When I move on and try to work through Sidewalk Starter Kit guide I encounter issues and confusion.

I get through the documentation fine until I reach Monitor the Device Using the Application. How would there be a device shown when we haven’t done anything with a device yet? Up until that point everything has been setting up the cloud infrastructure.

So ignoring that, as well as Registration Status and Upload History of the Device, I move onto the Device Setup.

The instructions state

  1. To flash the provisioning key, use RAKDAP1 adapter and run the following command to flash the HEX file you created.
pyocd flash -t nrf52840 YOUR_PROVISIONING_KEY.hex

But in the previous step where I ran the device provisioning script, “provision_sidewalk_end_device.py”, the result is successful but just as shown in the documentation, “Nordic_MFG.hex” is the file created and not a hex file sharing the name of the provisioning key.

Am I supposed to rename the “Nordic_MFG.hex” file? Is there a different hex file? I can successfully flash the file with the below command but that does not seem to accomplish the goal of registering the starter kit with AWS Sidewalk.

pyocd flash -t nrf52840 Nordic_MFG.hex

Adding to my confusion is that I am uncertain what is meant by “the right firmware”, as described by

The RAK4630 in the Sidewalk Starter Kit is already flashed with the right firmware.

In my debugging I tried flashing “Test-Recovery-RAK4631.hex” as shared by Bernd. That seems to work fine but now I don’t know which firmware to use to get back on track. I see there is a “demo.nrf52840dk_nrf52840.hex” provided by AWS but that doesn’t seem to help me. I also tried to start fresh by flashing the device with “firmware-rak4631-2.4.2.5b45303.uf2” but that doesn’t seem to help either.

  1. Which firmware should I be flashing prior to flashing the device credentials?
  2. Are the device credentials the “Nordic_MFG.hex” created by the provisioning script or something else?

As well as being new to Nordic, RAK, and Sidewalk, I feel like I have tried all sorts of different approaches the past couple days so I apologize if I am mixing things up. Thank you in advance for assistance and please let me know if I can clarify or provide more information.

Sorry about the formatting. As a new user I am limited:

Multiple errors occurred: 1) Sorry, new users can only put one embedded media item in a post. 2) Sorry, new users can only put 2 links in a post.

An additional point of clarification, the nRF Connect software is not needed, correct? The flashing operations can be performed solely with the RAKDAP and pyocd?

The Amazon Sidewalk Sample IoT App repo describes flashing Nordic devices with nRF Connect’s Programmer. Any attempts to connect via USB or the RAKDAP just results in:

Caution: No operations possible for device.
If the device is a MCUboot device make sure it is in the bootloader mode
If the device is a JLink device, please make sure J-Link Software is installed.

This is regardless of whether in bootloader mode and with several different versions of J-Link Software.

I too have blasted the factory loaded firmware by loading the test app. Did you manage to find a working image that runs the sidewalk app? When I run the demo.nrf52840dk_nrf52480.hex file I do not get a serial port (/dev/ttyXXX) nor does it connect to sidwalk. (I did load the cert file that I generated).