Bug: DK1 firmware fails to boot — SoftDevice S140 not found

[tpallip]

Bug: DK1 firmware fails to boot — SoftDevice S140 not found

Environment

• Hardware: Seeed XIAO nRF52840 Sense (Board-ID: nRF52840-SeeedXiaoSense-v1)
• Bootloader: 0.9.0 (from https://github.com/BasedHardware/omi/releases/download/v2.0.1-Omi/bootloader0.9.0.uf2)
• Firmware: friend-xiao_nrf52840_ble_sense-1.0.4.uf2 (from DK1 release)
• Host OS: Ubuntu (Linux)

Problem

After flashing bootloader0.9.0.uf2, the device never boots into firmware. It remains in UF2 bootloader/mass storage mode on every reset. No BLE advertising, no USR LED activity.

INFO_UF2.TXT on the mounted drive shows:

UF2 Bootloader 0.9.0 lib/nrfx (v2.0.0) lib/tinyusb (0.12.0-145-g9775e7691)
Model: Seeed XIAO nRF52840
Board-ID: nRF52840-SeeedXiaoSense-v1
SoftDevice: not found

Root Cause

The bootloader0.9.0.uf2 provided in the release does not include SoftDevice S140 7.3.0. The firmware requires SoftDevice to be present, but without it the device silently crashes back into bootloader on every boot.

The file is only 69KB — a bootloader with bundled SoftDevice S140 should be ~700KB+.

Expected Behavior

The provided bootloader .uf2 should either:

1. Bundle SoftDevice S140 7.3.0, or
2. The documentation should include an explicit step to flash SoftDevice separately before flashing firmware

Steps to Reproduce

1. Download bootloader0.9.0.uf2 from the v2.0.1-Omi release
2. Enter DFU mode (double-click reset)
3. Copy bootloader to XIAO-SENSE drive
4. Copy friend-xiao_nrf52840_ble_sense-1.0.4.uf2 to XIAO-SENSE drive
5. Device reboots back into bootloader — firmware never starts
6. Check INFO_UF2.TXT → SoftDevice: not found

Suggested Fix

Provide a combined bootloader+SoftDevice .uf2, or add a step in the Flash Device docs to flash Nordic SoftDevice S140 7.3.0 separately before flashing firmware.