Bluetooth Core 6.2 Shorter Connection Intervals availability in consumer hardware

[Oven8885]

Hi all,

I'm currently evaluating a few different vendors, chips and technologies for an
idea I've had. It's a wireless+USB gaming HID, so latency is very important.
1kHz polling (so ~1ms latency) would be ideal.

nRF5 chips offer solutions for most of the problems I'm facing. ESB is
excellent for low latency applications and the 52840 has USBD support. I could
easily use this chip for my application and it would work great, and I've done
some prototyping that is very promising. (And I'm thoroughly enjoying Zephyr!)

That being said, it would be great to offer Bluetooth connectivity as well as
ESB and USB, should some user prefer that, as it is very convenient not having
to deal with an ESB dongle. Given the 7.5ms minimum connection interval of
pre-6.2 BLE and that (in my experience with the hardware I have at hand) most
consumer centrals offer 11.25ms minimum CI, it seems that BLE might not be
ideal for my target polling rate and latency.

I have a few questions:

1. How widely available in consumer hosts is Shorter Connection Intervals at
the moment? I know these things take a while to make it to the consumer market.

2. Having a quick look at retailers it seems very hard to find a Bluetooth
dongle/PCI card that supports anything above Bluetooth 6.0. Since SCI was added
in 6.2, does that imply that these won't support SCI?

3. Since I'll need to ship a dongle anyway, would it be possible for it to act
as a HCI USB that offers BT 6.2 to the host? What BT stacks in mainstream
operating systems offer SCI?

Best,

[Kenneth]

Hello,

The Bluetooth core spec v6.2 have just been released, so it will take some time before it's adopted and rolled out on various platform and ecosystems. We don't have any overview of that no, but asking chatgpt it seems to think it will be late 2026 or early 2027 before it occurs. 

You can find a demo in the recent ncs v3.2.0 that we released right before New Year: https://webinars.nordicsemi.com/events/45684338354 

It should be possible to make a USB HID device that use Bluetooth as a transport, where the connection interval take use of the shorter connection interval by for instance using 1ms instead of the default 7.5ms that is currently possible. To find exactly what BLE feature is supported for a specific nRF5x variant check out here:
https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/ncs-3.2.1/page/nrf/releases_and_maturity/software_maturity.html#bluetooth_features_support 

By using USB HID, there will be no dependency of the OS in terms of BT core spec support.

Kenneth