nRF51 dongle Arduino / ATmega AVR with TWI ANT

[erltot]

I have a few nRF51 dongles I wish to use with ANT+ for wireless mesh communication between some robots. I want to connect each to one ATmega 1284p and another Arduino Mega with ATmega 2560, both 5v chips. Can I connect them directly to the GPIO edge pins to interface with TWI or will it destroy the nRF chip?

Edit; www.nordicsemi.com/.../nRF51-Dongle

[awneil]

So the PCA10031, then. Yes, I would guess that the 'VDD_3.3V' would be the one to use for the pullups - you should download the schematics to check ...

[erltot]

Excellent, I am just starting with the nordic chips now, but have some arduino and avr experience. Just to clarify - I am correct to assume that I can use the available GPIO pins on this dongle as twi as well then and that I can use the ant stack to communicate between my robots? Can I also use one dongle on my computer to communicate through UART to a server application? If this is somehow very complicated i'd like to know before I dig into this :-) Thank you for your replies so far.

[awneil]

I've not used the nRF51 I2C, but the way to check is the same as for any microcontroller:

1. Look at the chip datasheet to see what pins can function as I2C;
2. Look at the dongle schematics to see if any of the available connections map to the I2C-capable pins identified above.

The radio scheme you describe should be possible, but is certainly not a beginner project. You should plan to take some time to get familiar with ANT and the Nordic systems and experiment with simple connections before attempting the mesh ...