wiki:expansion/gw16126

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  1. GW16126 miniPCIe BLE / LTE Cat-M1 modem
    1. u-blox SARA-R4 LTE Cat M-1 modem
    2. u-blox NINA-B301 BLE module
      1. Bluetooth HCI (GW16126)
      2. Zephyr Project Firmware
      3. Programming the nRF58240
      4. u-blox Connectivity Software (GW16126-SP399)
    3. Software Support

GW16126 miniPCIe BLE / LTE Cat-M1 modem

The GW16126 is a miniPCIe form-factor card that features both a BLE 5.0 radio and a Cat-M1 modem designed for the IoT market.

The GW16126 interfaces with a host over USB 2.0 and uses the following pins on the miniPCIe card edge:

  • GND: pin 4,9,15,18,21,26,27,29,34,35,40,43,50
  • VDD_3P3: pin 2,24,39,41,52
  • USB_DM: pin 36
  • USB_DP: pin 38

Power draw varies greatly with the activity of the LTE Cat-M1 modem but typically varies between the milliwatt range to a max of around 2W

On the USB bus the following are present:

  • USB2514 USB 2.0 2-port HUB
    • FT231X USB UART connected to a u-blox NINA-B30x BLE module
    • u-blox NINA-B301 BLE module USB 2.0 controller
    • u-blox SARA-R4 Cat M-1 / NB1 modem with nano-SIM socket

These look like the following with lsusb: 

ID 05c6:90b2 Qualcomm, Inc. 
ID 0403:6015 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd Bridge(I2C/SPI/UART/FIFO)
ID 0424:2514 Standard Microsystems Corp. USB 2.0 Hub

The following devices will be created by the kernel modules:

  • /dev/ttyUSB0 (hci_uart) (CONFIG_BT_HCIUART, CONFIG_BT_HCIUART_H4 hci_uart)
  • /dev/ttyUSB1 (qcdm) (CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_OPTION option)
  • /dev/ttyUSB2 (at) (CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_OPTION option)
  • /dev/cdc-wdm0 (qmi) (CONFIG_USB_NET_QMI_WWAN qmi_wwan)
  • /sys/class/net/wwan0 (net) (CONFIG_USB_NET_QMI_WWAN qmi_wwan)

If for some reason you don't have all the drivers enabled above or have them static, you may find the /dev/ttyUSB devices enumerate in a different order. You can use a variety of ways to determine which device is which:

  • mmcli -m 0 will report details about detected modems and what devices they are on
  • ls -d /sys/bus/usb/drivers/ftdi_sio/*/ttyUSB* will tell you which tty is attached to the ftdi_sio driver to attach the Bluetooth HCI_UART to
  • ls -d /sys/bus/usb/drivers/option/*/ttyUSB* will tell you which tty's are attached to the option driver for the modem.

u-blox SARA-R4 LTE Cat M-1 modem

The ​u-blox SARA-R410M-52B LTE Cat M1 modem supports M1 bands 2,4,5,12,13.

The modem features a Qualcomm chipset that uses the 'option1' and 'qmi_wwan' Linux drivers providing the following devices:

  • /dev/ttyUSB1 (qcdm)
  • /dev/ttyUSB2
  • /dev/cdc-wdm0 (qmi)
  • /sys/class/net/wwan0 (net)

The modem is supported by Linux ModemManager and libqmi-utils.

u-blox NINA-B301 BLE module

The u-blox ​NINA-B301 stand-alone Bluetooth 5 low engery module contains an open ​Nordic nRF52840 multiprotocol SoC.

Bluetooth HCI (GW16126)

The standard GW16126 comes the nRF52840 pre-programmed by Gateworks with ​Zephyr Project ​hci_uart offering a bluetooth HCI UART host controller. The Open-Source Zephyr Project provides a small scalable real-time operating system (RTOS) well suited for small ARM processors such as the one in the nRF52840 and its ​hci_uart sample code implements a BLE HCI via the H4 UART protocol with the following:

  • 1mbps baudrate
  • 8bits, no parity, 1 stop bit
  • hardware flow control required

To use the GW16126 bluetooth HCI with Linux you need the following:

  • Linux 4.10+ kernel with the following:
    • FTDI UART support (CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_FTDI_SIO)
    • HCI UART with H4 (CONFIG_BT_HCIUART and CONFIG_BT_HCIUART_H4) in order to provide a bluetooth HCI over UART
    • crypto userspace API (CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER, CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER_API_AEAD, CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER_API_HASH, CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER_API_RNG, CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER_API_SKCIPHER) in order to generate a random Bluetooth MAC (BDADDR)
  • Bluetooth stack such as BlueZ (4.45+)

The following shows how you would interact with the BLE controller via BlueZ on Ubuntu bionic: 

apt-get install bluez
# configure bluez to run expirimental features
sed -i '/^ExecStart=/ s/$/ -E/' /lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service 
# restart bluetoothd
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart bluetooth
# attach HCI UART
dev=$(basename $(ls -d /sys/bus/usb/drivers/ftdi_sio/*/ttyUSB*))
modprobe hci_uart
btattach -B /dev/$dev -S 1000000 -P h4 &
# scan for BLE devices
hcitool -i hci0 lescan

Example: 

root@bionic-newport:~# echo 8 > /proc/sys/kernel/printk
root@bionic-newport:~# dev=$(basename $(ls -d /sys/bus/usb/drivers/ftdi_sio/*/tty
root@bionic-newport:~# modprobe hci_uart
[   35.314383] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.22
[   35.318121] NET: Registered protocol family 31
[   35.322614] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[   35.328997] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[   35.333904] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[   35.338983] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
[   35.350560] Bluetooth: HCI UART driver ver 2.3
[   35.355057] Bluetooth: HCI UART protocol H4 registered
root@bionic-newport:~# btattach -B /dev/$dev -S 1000000 -P h4 &
[1] 2138
Attaching Primary controller to /dev/ttyUSB0
Switched line discipline from 0 to 15
Device index 0 attached
[   57.834717] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
[   57.840137] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized
root@bionic-newport:~# hciconfig 
hci0:   Type: Primary  Bus: UART
        BD Address: 00:00:00:00:00:00  ACL MTU: 27:7  SCO MTU: 0:0
        UP RUNNING 
        RX bytes:527 acl:0 sco:0 events:41 errors:0
        TX bytes:258 acl:0 sco:0 commands:41 errors:0

root@bionic-newport:~# hcitool -i hci0 lescan
LE Scan ...
3C:A3:08:10:51:FE (unknown)
FC:B4:88:8E:32:61 (unknown)
FC:B4:88:8E:32:61 (unknown)
3C:A3:08:10:51:FE LEDBlue-081051FE

Zephyr Project Firmware

While the nRF52840 comes pre-programmed with firmware to make it a ​fully featured Bluetooth HCI you could develop your own firmware and re-program it if desired.

The ​Zephyr Project is a scaleable real-time operating system (RTOS) supporting multiple hardware architectures, optimized for resource constrained devices, and built with security in mind. The Zephyr Project supports the Nordic nRF58240 within the u-blox NINA-B3 BLE module and can be modified to give it a personality of its own. Some examples within the Zephyr Project that are suited for the GW16123 out of the box are:

  • HCI uart
  • BLE beacon

Gateworks has added GW16126 board support to Zephyr ​here via ​commit ba5f00ad

Examples:

  1. Install Zephyr source 
    git clone https://github.com/Gateworks/zephyr.git
cd ~/zephyr  # or to your directory where zephyr is cloned
# install more requirements via pip
pip3 install --user -r scripts/requirements.txt
  2. Build HCI UART (what Gateworks pre-programms into the GW16126): 
    # setup shell for building Zephyr
source zephyr-env.sh:
cd $ZEPHYR_BASE/samples/bluetooth/hci_uart
mkdir -p build/gw16126 && cd build/gw16126
cmake -DBOARD=nrf52840_gw16126 ../..
make
ls zephyr/zephyr.hex
  3. Build Bluetooth Beacon: 
    # setup shell for building Zephyr
source zephyr-env.sh:
cd $ZEPHYR_BASE/samples/bluetooth/beacon
mkdir -p build/gw16126 && cd build/gw16126
cmake -DBOARD=nrf52840_gw16126 ../..
make
ls zephyr/zephyr.hex

Programming the nRF58240

While the nRF52840 comes pre-programmed with firmware to make it a ​fully featured Bluetooth HCI you could develop your own firmware and re-program it if desired. The device can be programmed via SWD using the FT231X CBUS pins as follows:

  • CBUS1 - SWDIO
  • CBUS2 - SWDCLK

To program you can use OpenOCD with the sysfsgpio interface as long as you have a kernel that supports GPIO in the ftdi-sio driver (Linux 4.20+).

The following will create a gw16126.cfg OpenOCD interface file specifying SWD and mapping the SWCLK/SWDIO pins to the FT231X CBUS2/CBUS1 pins:

  1. Create an OpenOCD interface file for the GW16126 that defines the Linux gpio signals for SWD: 
    base=$(for i in $(ls -1d /sys/class/gpio/gpiochip*); do [ "ftdi-cbus" = "$(cat $i/label)" ] && cat $i/base; done)
[ "$base" ] || { echo "Error: could not find ftdi-cbus device - Linux 4.20+ required"; }
cat << EOF > gw16126.cfg
interface sysfsgpio
transport select swd
Show quoted text
sysfsgpio_swd_nums $((base + 2)) $((base + 1))
EOF
  2. Build OpenOCD from git master for nRF52840 support: 
    apt-get install build-essential git flex bison pkg-config libtool autoconf automake texinfo libusb-1.0-0-dev
git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/openocd/code openocd
cd openocd
./bootstrap
./configure --enable-sysfsgpio
make install
    • alternatively you can fetch from a zip archive via {{{wget --no-check-certificate

​https://repo.or.cz/openocd.git/snapshot/refs/heads/master.zip}}} but note that the bootstrap script which checkout jimtcl as git submodules so this doesn't really help

  • I've been having issues on bionic because NTP isn't working right which leads to certificate issues. You can disable by git config --global http.sslverify false
  1. Program firmware: 
    # openocd -f gw16126.cfg -f target/nrf52.cfg \
   -c init -c "reset init" -c halt -c "nrf5 mass_erase" -c "program zephyr_uart_hci.hex verify" -c reset -c exit
Open On-Chip Debugger 0.10.0+dev-00563-gda4b2d5b (2018-10-20-01:03)
Licensed under GNU GPL v2
For bug reports, read
        http://openocd.org/doc/doxygen/bugs.html
SysfsGPIO nums: swclk = 462, swdio = 461
adapter speed: 1000 kHz
cortex_m reset_config sysresetreq
Info : SysfsGPIO JTAG/SWD bitbang driver
Info : SWD only mode enabled (specify tck, tms, tdi and tdo gpios to add JTAG mode)
Info : This adapter doesn't support configurable speed
Info : SWD DPIDR 0x2ba01477
Info : nrf52.cpu: hardware has 6 breakpoints, 4 watchpoints
Info : Listening on port 3333 for gdb connections
target halted due to debug-request, current mode: Thread
xPSR: 0x01000000 pc: 0xfffffffe msp: 0xfffffffc
Info : nRF52840-QIAA(build code: C0) 1024kB Flash
target halted due to debug-request, current mode: Thread
xPSR: 0x01000000 pc: 0xfffffffe msp: 0xfffffffc
** Programming Started **
auto erase enabled
Warn : using fast async flash loader. This is currently supported
Warn : only with ST-Link and CMSIS-DAP. If you have issues, add
Warn : "set WORKAREASIZE 0" before sourcing nrf51.cfg/nrf52.cfg to disable it
wrote 49152 bytes from file zephyr.hex in 117.544823s (0.408 KiB/s)
** Programming Finished **
** Verify Started **
verified 47036 bytes in 2.723827s (16.864 KiB/s)
** Verified OK **

u-blox Connectivity Software (GW16126-SP399)

The GW16126-SP399 comes with the nRF52840 pre-programmed (and locked) by u-blox with the u-blox Connectivity Software.

Connection parameters:

  • 115200baud, 8 data bits no stop bit

Protocol details:

Examples:

  • Serial port interaction 
    # query configured role
AT+UBTLE?
+UBTLE:2
OK

# set to central
AT+UBTLE=1
OK

# store and power cycle
AT&W
OK
AT+CPWROFF
OK

+STARTUP

# report scan results
AT+UBTD

+UBTD:FCB4888E3261r,-76,"",2,0201061AFF4C0002156445C351577C4DA9AE12E57657E78C6F0000000000
+UBTD:FCB4888E3261r,-77,"",1,
OK
  • command line usage: 
    dev=$(basename $(ls -d /sys/bus/usb/drivers/ftdi_sio/*/ttyUSB*))
stty -F $dev 115200 ignbrk -brkint -icrnl -opost -onlcr -isig -icanon -iexten -echo -echoe -echok -echoctl -echoke
cat $dev & # continually display responses from tty in background
# request manufactuer identify
printf 'AT+GMI\r\n' > $dev
# request model
printf 'AT+GMM\r\n' > $dev
# request serial number
printf 'AT+GSN\r\n' > $dev
# request misc details
printf 'AT+ATI0\r\n' > $dev
# change role to central, write nvram, and reset
printf 'AT+UBTLE=1\r\n' > $dev
printf 'AT&W\r\n' > $dev
printf 'AT+CPWROFF\r\n' > $dev
# scan for BLE devices
sleep 1
printf 'AT+UBTD\r\n' > $dev

See also ublox s-center software for use on Windows

Software Support

The following software is necessary for the GW16126:

  • LTE Cat-M1 modem:
    • Linux 4.5 kernel with option driver (CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_OPTION) and qmi driver (CONFIG_USB_NET_QMI_WWAN)
  • BLE hci:
    • Linux 4.5 kernel
    • hci_uart driver (CONFIG_BT_HCIUART, CONFIG_BT_HCIUART_H4 hci_uart)
    • Userspace cryptographic algorithm support (CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER_API*) (for generation of random bdaddr in BlueZ)
    • Bluetooth stack such as BlueZ

Ubuntu bionic:

  • requires: bluez modemmanager libqmi bluez
  • works out of box

OpenWrt 18.6.1:

  • requires kmod-usb-net-opton, kmod-usb-net-qmi-wwan, kmod-usb-serial, kmod-usb-serial-ftdi, kmod-usb-serial-qualcomm, kmod-bluetooth, kmod-crypto-user, kmod-crypto-hash, bluez-daemon, uqmi
  • works out of the box

OpenWrt 16.02:

  • will not work without backporting qmi raw-ip support and modem ID's to option1/qmi-wwan driver

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