How does the nRF5 Linux driver work?

[amartino]

Based on this question I've assumed that it's possible to use nRF52832 for providing Bluetooth connectivity to an embedded Linux platform.

A quote from the github repo states:

pc-ble-driver is a static and shared library that provides serial port communication

From that I've assumed that the driver is a userspace library, meaning is just a wrapper for proprietary messages that are passed to a Linux serial device. In other words, the driver isn't a kernel module.

My questions are:

• Are the above assumptions correct?
• In a above scenario, how should the nRF52832 communicate with boards main CPU? UART?
• What firmware needs to be loaded to the nRF52832 so it behaves as a slave device that just provides the connectivity? As opposed when I'm writing custom firmware on the nRF52832 to turn on LEDs.

[David Edwin]

I think it would be best to use the hci-uart project in the zephyr project to provide the HCI implementation and then use BlueZ on linux to use the HCI implementation.

github.com/.../hci-uart .

Any further question should also be done in that community.

The pc-ble-driver provides the softdevice API over UART and does not provide the HCI interface needed for Linux.

You can use the pc-ble-driver in Linux as long as you build all the code necessary to use the pc-ble-driver

[Edited]

[amartino]

Will check, thanks. But what is the purpose of the pc-ble-driver then (given that you're suggesting me to move from it :) )?

[David Edwin]

Edited the answer to provide clarity on pc-ble-driver

[amartino]

Ok, but if my requirements aren't tied to the BlueZ API, I could as well use the "softdevice API over UART" from userspace?

[David Edwin]

you do need to run the pc-ble-driver interface for Linux and do the necessary things for it on Linux. In that case you can use the pc-ble-driver.