30 simultaneous BLE peripherals connections. Known solutions? nRF52840 Dongle?

RE: 30 simultaneous BLE peripherals connections. Known solutions? nRF52840 Dongle?

Simonr — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 06:47:18 GMT

Hi Fernando

You can use the open source Zephyr Bluetooth controller which is able to support more concurrent connections than 20. With this controller it depends on the RAM and Flash memory of the device you're using how many connections you'll be able to support, but I think 40 should be possible with the nRF52840 (depending on what else your application also does of course). See my colleague Hieu's reply in this ticket for some more details on this.

Best regards,

Simon

RE: 30 simultaneous BLE peripherals connections. Known solutions? nRF52840 Dongle?

FGranados — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 09:11:09 GMT

Hi Terje,

Thanks for your clarifying response. Just to confirm then, is there any Nordic solution we could use able to allow more than 20 concurrent connections?

Thanks again.

Regards,

Fernando.

RE: 30 simultaneous BLE peripherals connections. Known solutions? nRF52840 Dongle?

tesc — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 16:27:25 GMT

Hi,

Solutions built on pc-ble-driver are somewhat limited, in that pc-ble-driver itself has some limitations. As you already mention, memory usage is highly dependent on what features are used, and their configurations. Therefore some choices has been made in the connectivity firmware, to cover a wide range of use cases, but given finite resources some tradeoffs have been made.

If you want to continue down the route of using pc-ble-driver, then you might be able to get a better configuration (for your use case) through modifying the connectivity firmware. The firmaware is built on the serialization example from nRF5 SDK with a patch applied. Information (and patches) are found as part of the pc-ble-driver project on github.

For PC applications using an nRF device for BLE connectivity, one option going forward (away from pc-ble-driver) is to equip the nRF device with the Bluetooht: HCI USB sample from nRF Connect SDK, You then need a Bluetooth LE Host stack on the PC side.

Please note however that the absolute maximum number of connections, whether using something based on the SoftDevice and nRF5 SDK (such as pc-ble-driver), or based on the newer SoftDevice Controller with nRF Connect SDK, is still 20 concurrent connections.

Regards,
Terje