Receive BLE beacon on TWI from nrf51422

[peterv]

We have a new daughter board connected via I2C to an Atmel controller. What we need to do is load the right softstack onto the NRF and then send the needed commands to tell it to start advertising and whatever we need to do to receive any beacons it detects.

Is there a simple explanation of the steps needed and are there any similar example projects available ?

[Anders Strand]

Hello.

Let me split my answer into two parts, programming the nRF, and running the application.

Running the application Here you have two choices. The first one is using the nRF as a pure connectivity chip. Here the nRF will be used as a pure BLE chip, and all the logic is done on the host MCU. (The Atmel chip). The other is to create the custom firmware on the nRF, and implement some simple communication over i2c. We do have example projects in the SDK you can base your project on in both cases.

Programming You can program the nRF chip through the SWD interface with a normal programmer/debugger unit (from a PC). You use this to first program the softdevice (BLE stack), and then the application. You can also program the nRF through your main MCU if that is needed (this is more complicated). You can do this either through the SWD interface, or other serial interfaces (SPI, I2C, uart). If you need the latter, you must first flash the nRF with a Serial bootloader.

What kind of board is the nRF51 chip on?

Are you going to use this both as a beacon and beacon scanner, or just the scanner?

If you are completely new to the nRF, i recommend you to check out the getting started page, as well as our tutorial page.

[peterv]

Thanks for the information.

We are just scanner. We want to operate at reduced power by controlling when we start announcing that we are a device and then retrieve and log a beacon. The board is designed and we have samples, and it has been passed to us programmers to implement this function. Especially in the short term, we want to verify that it will work in our enclosure as quickly as we can. The nRF51 chip is on a custom board attached via I2C bus that we can read and write, we can also program it through the SWD interface. We are assuming we will run the protocol using a softdevice stack that we prgram in the factory but we should also support over the air updates.