Problem when adding a custom board in board manager

Hi @adrivin.

Unfortunately the error message is not very helpful. The problem is this part of your package index:

This tells Arduino CLI to install version 0.5.3 of the nrfutil tool that is provided by the adafruit package. However, if you look in the relevant package index, you will see that it does not provide any such tool:

https://adafruit.github.io/arduino-board-index/package_adafruit_index.json

The reason is that, for some inexplicable reason, the developers of the "Adafruit nRF52" boards platform bundled the tool with the platform instead of distributing it separate from the platform as is usually done:

So this means you will need to find a different way of providing the nrfutil tool dependency of your platform. You could do that by putting the burden of installing the tool manually on the user, as Adafruit did for Linux users:

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino#adafruits-nrfutil-tools

adafruit-nrfutil (derived from Nordic pc-nrfutil) is needed to upload sketch via serial port.

  • For Windows and macOS, pre-built executable binaries are included in the BSP at tools/adafruit-nrfutil/. It should work out of the box.
  • Linux user need to run follow command to install it from PyPi
$ pip3 install adafruit-nrfutil --user

Or you can host the tool archives somewhere on the web (using GitHub release assets is a simple solution), then add the entry for the tool to your own package index. You can learn about how to do that from the Arduino Package Index Specification:

https://arduino.github.io/arduino-cli/latest/package_index_json-specification/#tools-definitions

Cool!