nRF8001 Sleep mode Pairing

[Florent Muret]

Hi Support team,

I am looking to replace my BLE chip by a nRF8001. I am currently using a DA14580 (Dialog Semiconductor), in  Beacon mode or pairing mode. I saw that the nRF8001 cannot works in Beacon, so I am wondering about pairing mode : is that possible to connect/pair the BLE chip to a device (smartphone), to do advertising, and then put the nRF8001 in sleep mode and still keep the connection between the phone and the BLE chip in the same time ? Then I will be able to trigger an interupt, go out of the nRF8001 sleep mode and do another advertising without needed to connect the device again. Is this behavior possible (as I would like to use pairing mode with the smallest amount of current as possible).

Thanks by advance for your help,

Best regards,

Florent

[David Edwin]

Can you explain a bit more about Beacon Mode and Pairing Mode that you use on the DA,  so we could suggest the equivalent modes for the Nordic devices ? The nRF8001 automatically goes to sleep between advertising and connection intervals.

[Florent Muret]

Hi David ! I mean i tried both mode, a classic pairing mode where jyou need to paired the BLE chip with your device, but keep a "link" between those, and a Bluetooth Beacon, then I broadcast the identifier to every near portable device.

I saw that the 8001 doesn't have the Beacon functionality (instead of nRF51822 for example). So I would like to work with the nRF8001 in Pairing mode but I was just wondering if even in sleep mode the Device and the chip stay paired ?     

[David Edwin]

The nRF8001 is a single role device so it can either be a broadcaster (beacon) or a slave. The nRF5x series has the ability to have multiple roles running concurrently in time slices. 

Pairing or more specifically bonding is the act of sharing keys between devices and the key will stay shared unless deleted. In this case the phone and nRF8001 will stay bonded even if the devices are sleeping, however you must note that when sleeping the link is not in connected state.

It is possible to add an id into the advertising data when advertising in bonding/bonded state, by using the Broadcast Service Pipes. (Section 20.6 , nRF8001 PS)

Can you go into details of what you want to do in beacon mode ? 

[Florent Muret]

Hi David, thanks for your help.

Just to be clear I just want to try both mode (Broadcaster and pairing), but not at the same time. So if the nRF8001 is able to works in those two mode but separately it fits me. I use the BLE to send some sensor's data from a embedded system to a smartphone. The purpose it's to realize a demo to show customer our TEG harvesting system, and it is more handy to have a BLE which doesn't require a connection.

By the way do you have an idea of the speed of the data transmission while using pairing or beacon (suppose to be slower) ?

So if understand well, if you click on "disconnect" button on your phone (while using a portable speaker or whatever BLE pairing device), it stop to share the key? And so when the BLE chip awakes, the link between the device and the BLE came back automatically in connected state ? 

And do you have some "pre-made" code in C, cause I found a lot of documentation while using Arduino, but nothing about using a regular microcontroller in C language ?

Thanks for your answer, much appreciated. 

[David Edwin]

The arduino code is close to C and can be easily moved to C. There is a porting document available for use.

There are some basic ports for STM32, MSP430 and AVR(pure C) that are available on devzone. Let me know if any of them will work for you.

[Florent Muret]

Ok thanks for thoses links. I guess you can have pre-made code in C as well on nRFgo studio as well ? 

[David Edwin]

you can but typically it is preferable to just use the services.h which contains the #defines and not use the generated C code.