ACI and HCI

[Xue Liu]

Hello,

I am a newbie of Bluetooth development. I have a question that what is the difference between ACI (Application Controller Interface) given in nRF 8001 and HCI (Host Controller Interface) given in Bluetooth standard ? Is ACI compatible with HCI ?

Regards,

Xue Liu

[John]

As I understand it ACI is Nordic's proprietary command/event interface presented by the nRF8001 so you can communicate with the GATT layer of the BLE stack from your controller microprocessor. HCI on the other hand is part of the Bluetooth standard and is a stack layer that allows control of the the Bluetooth IC/radio by a host controller such as a PC or mobile OS.

[David Edwin]

John has you covered. The HCI is a lower level interface while the ACI is a high level interface that covers GAP and GATT (Server and Client roles). ACI is not compatible with HCI.

[Xue Liu]

Thank you for your info.