At my university we use the Micro:Bit v2 in various courses at various levels. Unfortunately the Micro:Bit Educational Foundation changed the interface chip in 2022, rendering the current J-Link OB v2 firmware for v2.00 unusable. This has also been reported on the Segger forum (here and here) as well as by another university in the Nordic Developer forum (here). The purchase of older Micro:Bit v2's is near impossible, creating a predicament for us and many other universities and users that rely on the great functionality J-Link OB provides. For example, without it users cannot press Flash or Debug in the Visual Studio Code IDE with the nRF connect SDK and need to use a command line tool West. This scenario is typical for Zephyr RTOS development on the Micro:Bit. J-Link is required for devices to be detected as noted in the Nordic documentation (here).

I would like to bring this feature request under your attention again, in the hope that other universities and users can also share their need for this valuable firmware update. I learned that developing this firmware is unfortunately a charity project for Segger and that development time is fully booked with commercial projects. Is there anything the community (with many expert embedded developers) can do to shorten the development time? Has there been contact between the Micro:Bit Educational Foundation or Nordic Semi as a project partner and Segger to possibly fund the port as it drives adoption of boards and chips by universities?

Many thanks, Steven Bos (USN, Norway)