Need your help

[Usman Rashid]

Dear Sir/ Madam,

I want your suggestions and recommendation regarding to choose which one of your BLE development kit.

I want a Bluetooth development kit which has long range and consume lesser battery. Basically, I want beacon as an slave and development kit module as an master. I want beacon to send the location coordinates to master / development kit and then development kit will send the location message to its UART port that I can see on putty or terminal software.

Please give me some suggestion that which of your module or whole development kit can fulfill my needs? I am not a embedded software developer so that is why I need to some kit which is easily understandable and in which I can easily do changes.

Looking forward to your reply.

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Hi,

The best alternative if you want a production ready development kit, that support Bluetooth Low Energy is the nRF52 DK, which contain the nRF52832 IC. The range of this device is up to 100m outdoor in line of sight, with typical indoor range of 10-20m.

If you need longer range, the nRF52840 PDK can be an alternative. This support Bluetooth 5.0 with the new long range feature, which can increase the range by using lower data rate. Notice that the devices you are connecting to must support this mode as well for this to work. The nRF52840 is currently only available in engineering samples and preview models, the production variant will become available in Q4 2017.

Best regards,

Jørgen

[Usman Rashid]

Is there any difference in the range of communication between nRF52832 and nRF51822 other than the power consumption?

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Yes, the nRF51822 have a BLE sensitivity of -93dBm, while nRF52832 have a sensitivity of -96dBm. This corresponds to a theoretical range increase for the nRF52832 of ~40% under optimal conditions.

[Usman Rashid]

Basically, can you send me or give me some links so that I can start learning to how to code on your development kit.

Another thing is we want some ready made example or code of Beacon side which will transmit the location information that we will enter in to it and then the other side which is the master side, in our case the development kit will receives the data and transmit it to its UART port.

First for the proof of concept I want to send AT commands from the DK to terminal software (putty).

Do you have such ready made example in your blog?

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

A great starting point for getting started with the nRF52 DK is the Getting started tutorial here on DevZone. There is also other tutorials available, especically the BLE tutorials are helpful if you will be using the BLE feature of the chip. Notice that the tutorials are under rework, as they are written for an earlier SDK version. Our SDK contain examples for all peripherals and a lot of usecases, both using BLE and other protocols. If you want to scan for devices (beacons) and transmitt the advertising data to a computers terminal, I would recommend to start with the Nordic UART Service Client example. You have to do some small changes to the example to transfer the advertising data over UART, but the rest is setup allready.