BLE/Wi-Fi co-existence on Thingy 91 X

[Scott Grubb]

Hi,

The Thingy 91 X uses a shared antenna for BLE and Wi-Fi.  I can see from the Hardware Guide and the schematics that there are several hardware connections between the nRF5340 SoC and the nRF7002 Wi-Fi companion IC to support wireless co-existence.  There is also a single GPIO connection between the nRF5340, the nRF7002 and the FET (Q5) that is used to control the RF switch (U22) that directs the RF signal.  However, it is not obvious whether it is the nRF7002 or the nRF5340 that controls the FET or whether the GPIO pins are configured to allow either device to control it.

I would like to develop an application for the Thingy that uses both BLE and Wi-Fi.  (The latter for SSID-based location finding).  I would prefer to host my application on the nRF9151 SiP such that the nRF9151 will control the nRF7002 via SPI and will access BLE via a UART connection to the nRF5340, which will be running the nRF Bluetooth HCI sample app.

Will this architecture/configuration support shared use of the antenna, or does the nRF5340 need to control the nRF7002 for wireless co-existence to work (i.e. do I need to host my application on the nRF5340)?

Thanks

Scott

[Charlie]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for reaching out with your questions.

It's not straightforward to make your current application work with the Thingy91X hardware design.

The nRF5340 SoC needs to be used as the host in order to support automatic antenna coexistence with the nRF7002. However, in your case, the nRF9160 is acting as the application host, which makes this challenging.

As an alternative, you could consider implementing application-level control to avoid conflicts. For example, you might have the nRF9160 send a UART command to the nRF5340 to disable BLE when Wi-Fi scanning is active.

Best regards,
Charlie