Basic nrf51422-EV get started questions

[Martin]

Hello

I am new to developing with the evaluation kit and have a few very basic questions.

Any answers or pointers to relevant documents would be much appreciated.

1: In the ev kit there are one board and one usb dongle, what are the main differences between these two? Is the only difference that the board has led's, GPIO and power management compared to the dongle?

2: Our plan right now is to use the usb dongle as a bluetooth low energy master connected to a machine running linux with several slaves connected to that master with different bluetooth profiles. We then imagine a server reading and pushing data to the slaves. Is this even possible? We have sort of set up bluez on the linux machine and successfully connected it to a mobile phone using commands in the terminal. We have downloaded the drivers for the usb dongle from the Segger website, but thats where it stops. We can't seem to figure out how to get the dongle (or board, which one we use is irrelevant) connected and working with the bluez stack on the linux machine.

Any help or tips greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

[Ole Morten]

The primary difference between the Evaluation Kit and the USB dongle is the amount of buttons and LEDs on-board, and the ease of connecting things to the GPIOs. The nRF51822 chip is the same, and the Segger chip comes with the exact same functionality on both. The Linux drivers for it enables you to program the nRF51822, and send and receive UART data from it.

The USB dongle is hence not a proper Bluetooth USB dongle, and will not work out of the box with BlueZ. If this is what you want, I'd recommend you to instead get hold of a regular Bluetooth 4.0 compatible USB dongle, for instance this, which I've personally used successfully under Linux.