"No network interface" error with zephyr:nrf52840

Development Platforms
1

I assume that I am missing some obvious step, but I cannot find which. I have a NRF52840_DK clone-ish board --a chinese knock-off, but with that I have been able to run some OpenThread examples (from openthread.io), so the board is operative.

Now I want to develop some OpenThread applications and I chose platformio (because I am familiar with it) and zephyr (because… it seems a good choice?).

My platformio.ini is quite basic:

[env:nrf52840_dk]
platform = nordicnrf52
board = nrf52840_dk
framework = zephyr

The prj.conf contains several basic flags (inspired from the overlay-ot.conf in the echo-client example, which is this file).

However, there is some network/interface error. The logs in RTT Viewer are the following:

00> [00:00:00.000,000] <err> net_if: There is no network interface to work with!
00> [00:00:00.003,265] <inf> net_config: Initializing network
00> [00:00:00.003,265] <err> net_config: No network interfaces
00> [00:00:00.003,265] <err> net_config: Network initialization failed (-19)

And the UART shell shows no iface when asked:

*** Booting Zephyr OS build zephyr-v20300  ***
uart:~$ net iface
uart:~$

It’s as if the radio module for that SoC was not being build/initialized/configured. What am I missing?

2

I couldn’t work on that for a few weeks, and after shuffling around some configuration and migrating the shell to the RTT the issue has solved itself.

Maybe I had some incompatible config flags that resulted in no network interface?

The only conscious change I have introduced in my prj.conf is:

CONFIG_USE_SEGGER_RTT=y
CONFIG_SHELL_BACKEND_RTT=y
CONFIG_RTT_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_UART_CONSOLE=n
CONFIG_LOG=y

This thread seems a little bit useless right now. I’ll leave it as a testimonial that it works, and as a suspicion that this general error is due to an inappropriate prj.conf configuration :man_shrugging: