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
- 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.
- Which firmware should I be flashing prior to flashing the device credentials?
- 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:
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