Requirements to connect by smartphone to nrf51822

[Dmitri]

Hi,

I am very new to BlueTooth technology. Currently i'm testing the nRF51822 evaluation kit to see if the BLE module can be used for a specific project. I've tried several Keil example project templates as pointed out in the evaluation kit documentation. The question that popped up during testing is why can't a smartphone find the advertisements sent by the evaluation board in the heart rate monitor template, for example(tested several phones including Lumia 720, nexus 5 and galaxy S4).

Initial examination of the code didn't find any restrictions as to why the dongle sees the broadcast, but a smartphone scan cannot. Am i misunderstanding some principle on which Bluetooth software stack works? Does the phone require custom software with a reference to the nRF51822 device?

[Hung Bui]

You don't need to use the Master Control Panel App when developing your app.

The APIs to scan connect and transfer data with BLE slave is natively provided from Android v4.3. You can find the documentation here . You also have an simple BLE example that do scan and connect, included in the Android SDK.

We also provide nRFToolbox app that support various BLE profiles. The source code for nRFToolbox can be downloaded from our website.