nRF51 Dongle as a standard Bluetooth Smart 4.2 Dongle

[Jon Hoffman]

I have 2 nRF51 Development kits and a nRF51 dongle that I am using for proof of concepts. I am mainly using the nRF51 IoT SDK because we are looking at using IPv6 with 6LoWPAN. I have a standard Bluetooth 4.0 dongle that is connected to my Linux box and I have done several client/server experiments between the linux box and the development kits. The next item that I want to do is to do a speed test to show the difference between a connection that has two 4.2 devices however I can not find a standard bluetooth 4.2 compliant dongle (4.2 is suppose to be 10X faster than 4.0) for sale therefore I thought I could configure the nRF51 development dongle as a standard dongle that I could connect to my Linux box. I may be totally missing something obvious (would not be the first time) but is there a way I can configure (soft device + application) to make the nRF51 development dongle act as a standard Bluetooth 4.2 compliant dongle that I can use with my Linux box?

[Petter Myhre]

What kind of throughput are you seeing? There are no mandatory features in 4.2 that increase throughput, so even though a dongle supports 4.2, it doesn't necessary mean an increase in throughput. And actually, the nRF51/nRF51 SoftDevices doesn't support the optional features that could increase throughput compared to 4.0/4.1. So even if you had a dongle that supports the features, the throughput wouldn't increase. Currently, this is also true for the nRF52, but we are working on implementing more features on it.