The Nordic Dongle with the Nano 33 BLE bootloader seems very stable.

I think PlatformIO.org is the key to working with all these boards and using their different strengths to our advantage.

Yes Gitpods are amazing The Github is here and the Snapshot is.

Arduino Nano Software Serial Pins Tx How To Get These

Anyone with any experience is welcome to add their views on how to get these boards running.

Still not fully working, but has some promise for the Particle Photon.

But you might be interested in how I connect a debugger to the Arduino Nano BLE 33.

So it can be easily connected to a Black Magic Probe or to a J-Link (using an inexpensive adapter).

I will probably just solder the SWDCLK and SWDIO connections and use the boards GND and RESET and plugin the board for 3V3.

I am not at that point yet, but really good to know it is an option.

The Particle boards simply because I have a class set of them.

The Particle Xenon is just another cheap BLE board, but the Argon has an ESP32 with the nRF52840 SOC giving a few more interesting options.).

The final result might be as boring as: use Arduino for Arduino, Nordic for Nordic, Particle for Particle Mesh.

For me it is about once every 5 years, I have been doing this for 40 years.

So I hooked the debugger up to my Particle Xenons and tried to drop particle.bin bootloaders and softdevices but nothing worked.

Drop the file on the folder and it disappears and returns with a fail.txt file when things dont work.

Showing a very bright red LED which in the Particle world means something is broken.

Double pressed the mode button, windows installed new driver and it uploaded.

Had to fight a bit to find the COM port., I think I restarted it.

Then the Arduino serial monitor started churning out A0 analog reading.

Nothing connected just testing).

I got my bricked Nano 33 BLE working and managed to load the Nano 33 BLE bootloader onto both the Nordic nrf52840 Dongle and the Makerdiary dongle.

I could not figure out how to get the makerdiary dongle go into dfu mode.

For the Nordic nrf52840 dongle there are pins that will do it but I managed to hold the main button while tapping the reset button and it worked.

Got that trick from an Adafruit site ).