nRF9160 Thing Plus boost of motivation needed please

Development Boards Other Microcontrollers
1

I bought the nRF9160 Thing Plus. Couldn’t figure out how to make it work since I don’t really know much about embedded development (however, I try…).

Then I bought the Nordic nRF9160 development kit and went through their DevAcademy certification on how to bring the system up to a usable state and understanding the SDK and basics of Zephyr.

Now I have the Nordic nRF9160 dev board up and running as I need it to, and everything works as expected (LTE, socket, mqtt, etc.). However, for a proof of concept, I need to use the SparkFun nRF9160 Thing Plus because of the size and form-factor. When I port the exercises from the Nordic dev kit to the SparkFun board I just cannot make an LTE connection.

I constantly get this error:

*** Booting nRF Connect SDK v3.5.99-ncs1-1 ***

[00:00:00.252,960] Lesson2_Exercise2: Initializing modem library

[00:00:00.441,345] lte_lc: Could not send AT command, error: 65536

[00:00:00.441,375] lte_lc: Failed to set system mode and mode preference, err -14

[00:00:00.441,375] Lesson2_Exercise2: Connecting to LTE network

+CEREG: 2,“C3B6”,“032E2B78”,7,0,0,“11100000”,“11100000”

+CEREG: 2,“FFFE”,“FFFFFFFF”,7,0,0,“11100000”,“11100000”

+CEREG: 2,“C3B6”,“032E2B78”,7,0,0,“11100000”,“11100000”

+CEREG: 2,“FFFE”,“FFFFFFFF”,7,0,0,“11100000”,“11100000”

Basically, I just use the Nordic exercise code and configuration directly with the Sparkfun with the only exception being that I create a build file specifically for the SparkFun board and then add the magic line to prj.conf

CONFIG_BOOTLOADER_MCUBOOT=y

What is the next step I should take to debug this issue ?

I’ve tried my best with google (etc.) but no luck so far.

What insights do you clever people have that can help me ?

2

Ok, I didn’t have any suggestions, but I gave the problem to a few different AI models and am posting a link to their suggestions (pasting here is too long!) https://poe.com/s/Aob5YIGKW1fONiMd5iju :slight_smile:

3

Thanks, appreciate it. However, it didn’t really get me any closer to a solution.

4

I mean, it has to be something in the code if the SF examples are working and then Nordic ones aren’t…what did the debug that was suggested say? Did the conf files match? Board files confirmed? UART config?

It gave a ton of suggestions…which of those have been tried/confirmed as not being the problem?

5

I get what you are saying, and sorry for being a bit dismissive in my response.

I guess what I was hoping for was someone demonstrating a working sample of code/project that works with this board and that can actually performs LTE connect and connects to a Socket.