nRF5340 with Bluetooth 5.4 Availability

[syedadil19]

Hello everyone,

I'm in the middle of my final year project and I am supposed to transmit audio signal from an analog microphone to a phone using Bluetooth. As far as I understand, only Bluetooth 5.2 and above would be supporting Audio LE for audio wireless transmission right? 

Which brought me to this link https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/nRF5340. I clicked on "Buy samples" to purchase some of the nRF5340 SoC for our project to be used with an Arduino Nano 33 BLE. However, I've only found the nRF5340 which supports Bluetooth 5.1 on Mouser and one which supports Bluetooth 5.2 on DigiKey as per the Datasheets attached on their website. Mouser's description was confusing as the nRF5340 was described as "RF System on a Chip - SoC Dual-core Bluetooth 5.2 SoC supporting Bluetooth Low Energy, Bluetooth mesh, NFC, Thread, and Zigbee" while the Datasheet attached in their website says differently. My questions are,

1. Will the nRF5340 with Bluetooth 5.2 sufficient for my project? If not, where can i find the nRF5340 with Bluetooth 5.4? And,

2. How can I use the SoC with my Nano 33 BLE? I could not think of how to integrate them together as my idea was like to only use it's Audio LE capability.

Thank you in advance.

nRF5340 from Mouser - www.mouser.co.uk/.../nRF5340-QKAA-R7

nRF5340 from DigiKey - www.digikey.co.uk/.../14323742

[Raoul]

Hi,

I think that the information from the distributors is just outdated. As far as I know, any nRF5340 version you can find will support BLE 5.4.

2. How can I use the SoC with my Nano 33 BLE? I could not think of how to integrate them together as my idea was like to only use it's Audio LE capability.

I'm not certain what you mean here, could you elaborate your question?

Best regards,

Raoul

[syedadil19]

Hi,

Thank you for your reply. I need to transmit audio signal to my phone using BLE, which is why I require the nRF5340 as it supports Audio LE. But, I am already using an Arduino Nano 33 BLE which is required for other part of the project. My plan is to only use the nRF5340 for it’s Audio LE capability together with my Nano 33 BLE which is executing other programs for the project.

Regards,

Syed

[Raoul]

Hi,

I see! Well, if you use two MCU's on your board, you have a number of options to "integrate" them. It's common to use a serial communication protocol such as UART; SPI or I2C. If the expected interaction for one of the chips is simple, you could also just use GPIO's to toggle behavior.

If you want to learn more about these protocols, you could check out our nRF Connect courses on https://academy.nordicsemi.com/

I also recommend you to consider whether you can do everything on the nRF5340, since you need that one anyway. It would depend on how much stuff your Nano is doing, and how much audio stuff you are doing (multiple streams, or just one?) but I think you might be able to do away with the nano entirely. That would simplify your design.

Best regards,

Raoul

[syedadil19]

That means I’ll need to configure the nRF5340 using the nRF Connect SDK to upload my programs right?

[Raoul]

Yes, you would have develop firmware in the nRF Connect SDK. You can use one of our many samples as references.

Best regards,

Raoul