Bluetooth multipoint connections with selectable receivers

[HD_Rieper]

Hello, our company is, amongst other things, developing motors for roller blinds. A recent product idea is as follows: We have in a room, for example, 3 blinds with motors. Each motor has a Nordic nRF52 as a Bluetooth receiver. We want to offer a remote control (Nordic nRF52) that can connect with all three motors on NFC touch and connect and communicate via bluetooth. We wish to controll with the remote control all the motors as once and also be able to address individually (groups?). We may also want to register several remote controls to a motor. In parallel, we would like to offer a remote control app (Android, iOS). The mobile phone should also connect via NFC touch and communicate with the motors via Bluetooth. Is this technically generally possible with your product? Especially with respect to the Bluetooth connection of a motor with several remotes / Smartphones and several motors to one remote? How time intensive you think is such a development in terms of the pure compound structure and data exchange mechanisms using their Bluetooth stack (SDK)?

Our American Division developed a product called "PowerView", which uses also the Nordic chips (nRF51) and Remotes with the nordic chip and is also App controlled. It doesn't use bluetooth communication, but a different protocol. For the App-Control a HUB (Gateway)is needed.

For simpler products, we would like to realize the above disclosed solution without HUB.

Thank you for your support,

[Einar Thorsrud]

This sounds like a interesting product. There are a few problems with it, however (at least when using the nRF52):

• The nRF52 can only act as a NFC tag, so you would not be able to make the remote (which would have to act as a reader) using a nRF52 alone.
• The peripheral (blinds in this case) can be bonded to several BLE centrals (remote, phone etc.) at the same time, but only be connected to one at a time. Thus you would have to use one remote of phone at a time, and disconnect after use so that the other can connect to the peripherals. (In theory it should be legal for a peripheral to have multiple simulations connections with different centrals, but this is not supported by our SoftDevices.)

The other aspects of your idea should work as expected:

• Out of band pairing using NFC where the nRF52 is a Tag (in the blinds)
• Control multiple peripherals from one central

It seems your requirements are best met using a combination of proprietary and BLE, as you write you already do with "PowerView".

It is impossible to say anything about how time intensive the development may be. It depends on many factors, including the requirements of your product, the number of and skills of your developers etc.

[1_andi]

Hello, our Company wants to develop a product with similar function. If I understand you well, this means that we can multiple periphals from one central control? We aim to have one central. This central queries the important data from the two peripheral.

It is possible to transmit alternately data from the peripheral to the central?

Thank you for your support

[Einar Thorsrud]

Yes, a nRF51 or nRF52 as a central can be connected to multiple peripherals. The maximum number of peripherals vary between the SoftDevices, but all S120 and S130 versions can be connected to more than two peripherals.