Can BLE beacons act as receivers?

RE: Can BLE beacons act as receivers?

mkaze — Sat, 07 Oct 2017 14:44:06 GMT

No, you are absolutely right! I am a newbie with the BLE! Thanks a lot for the links!

RE: Can BLE beacons act as receivers?

endnode — Sat, 07 Oct 2017 14:32:55 GMT

Yes, they can act as general passive/active scanner so your application running on top of BLE stack will receive callback event whenever any broadcasted packet is captured.

Now based on the level of your questions (sorry, no offence) I would recommend to start from the very beginning: read tutorials, read Getting started page on Infocenter, scanning is part of basically every example (except simple beacon) inside nRF5 SDK.

RE: Can BLE beacons act as receivers?

mkaze — Sat, 07 Oct 2017 14:00:23 GMT

@endnode Thank you very much. This is very important to me, so just to make sure: you mean they can receive broadcasted data by other beacons (i.e. act as a beacon scanner like the android beacon scanner apps) without any physical connection or pairing, right? And would you kindly tell me which part of the documentation/tutorial I should take a look at? Thanks again.

RE: Can BLE beacons act as receivers?

endnode — Sat, 07 Oct 2017 13:39:46 GMT

Basically any BLE SoC like nRF5x series (or competition like TI CC2xxx) can do both transmit and receive. It's because to do any basic BLE link functionality the chip anyway needs to be able to do both Tx and Rx so the rest is just SW capability of BLE stack. So don't worry, all basic features for the solution you outline are met by nRF51 (although no one would really go with nRF51 for new project when you can take nRF52 for basically same BOM cost and have much powerful platform with more memory, RAM and in most cases also lower power consumption).

To your second question: yes indeed, you can combine nRF5x chips with any other solution which provides some standard wired interface such as I2C(TWI), SPI or UART. Just note that all the routing and logic inside such complex will need to be written in the FWs of BLE and WiFi chips (by you;).