NRF24L01 compatibility with other transceivers?

[kjhuebner]

I've been using the NRF24L01 transceiver to wirelessly broadcast data back and forth among 4 devices, where each device contains the NRF24L01 chip. Everything works great, as all devices are able to successfully communicate.

But my concern is backward compatibility. I would like each new generation of the product to be backward compatible with previous generation product.

Does this mean each new model of the product must ALSO use the NRF24L01 transceiver? If yes, I'm not fond of this as I'm then tied to this specific transceiver, and Nordic may eventually drop this chip from production.

I noticed that most RF transceiver low-level wireless "over the air" protocols are rarely compatible.

Perhaps if I switched to a standard protocol e.g. Bluetooth or WiFi -- I would not be tied to a specific transceiver. This may give me the design freedom to potentially switch to different transceiver model/manufacturer in the future for lower cost, or more features.

If you have any ideas how best to approach my problem, please respond.

Thanks!

Ken Huebner Hardware Engineer Huebner Design

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Hi Ken,

From the product briefs of our nRF51 and nRF52 series, you can see that these devices are "Fully on-air compatible with nRF24L Series" and "On-air compatible with nRF51, nRF24AP and nRF24L Series". Both series are Multiprotocol Bluetooth low energy, ANT/ANT+ and 2.4GHz proprietary System-on-Chip, allowing you to take the step into the world of Bluetooth Low Energy, while keeping backwards compatibility with your old nRF24L01 devices. All versions of the Bluetooth Low Energy protocol provide backwards compatibility towards earlier versions of the standard, reducing your concern for future products.

We provide a SDK with examples for our proprietary protocols, ESB and Gazell, and even provide a BLE/Gazell multiprotocol example showing how BLE and proprietary can be used together.

Best regards,

Jørgen