Zephyr code on XIAO BLE Sense no longer runs when updating nRF Connect SDK above v2.5

Hello!

I am hitting a really frustrating issue running Zephyr on a XIAO BLE Sense module which is based on the nRF52840 MCU. I am simply trying to verify development setup is correct by running the blinky sample code on the XIAO BLE Sense before I start writing any code. Since the XIAO BLE Sense is a supported Zephyr board I simply created a new blinky application and set the build configuration as xiao_ble_sense. Using nRF SDK 2.7.0 I built my code and flashed it to the board. Nothing happened. I rolled back the SDK to 2.6.1 and 2.5 and still nothing happened.

Since the module is based on the nRF52840 I figured I would try using the nRF52840 DK nRF52840 build configuration and just update the device tree so the red LED pin matches the XIAO module red LED (P0.26). I then repeated the building experiment looping through SDKs from 2.7.0 to 2.5.0 and each time got different behavior. Below are the results, but only with SDK 2.5.0 did the code work as expected.

Here is my setup:

OS: Windows 11

Dev Environment: VS Code 1.95.1

Toolkit: nRF Connect SDK for VS Code

Programmer: J-Link Edu Mini

Board: Xiao BLE Sense (Schematic)

This seems like some sort of bug, as using a newer version of the SDK does not produce functioning code. Any idea what is going on here?

Thanks,

Parker