BLE for Energy Harvesting

[Marcin Brylak]

Dear Nordic Semiconductor team,

I just wonder if BLE is suitable for energy harvesting topic?. I want to ask if your ASIC need permanent power supply? An idea behind is to use a piezo-energy-harvester as energy source and provide stable DC voltage for BLE TX for ~ 20ms. The BLE device should send an information to receiver. We did some trials and it works good with ZigBee 3.0 but we are interested to use BLE.

Thanks

BR

M.Brylak

[Rune Holmgren]

Hi,

BLE is well suited for energy harvesting applications. Our device wakes up and initializes the BLE stack quickly enough that a small amount of power for a short duration is sufficient for getting a small amount of data transferred. You do not have to have a permanent power supply since a short window of time with power is enough to get the radio up and running and send a few small packets. We have customers like EnOcean who are already using our devices with energy harvesting.

Best regards,
Rune Holmgren

Bonus video showing the EnOcean product light switch

[Marcin Brylak]

Hi Rune,

Thanks a lot for your answer. We have now problems to compile examples with Arduino.This can be an issue with driver or Arduino. Can you tell me which driver is the best for this purpose? I did instalation of uKeil 5 but with freeware version is not possible to compile. Can I use other software to compile your BLE examples?

Fullscreen ArduinoIDE_BLE_Nano2_error_report.txt Download

Arduino: 1.8.5 (Windows 7), Board: "BLE_Nano2"

Sketch uses 56964 bytes (10%) of program storage space. Maximum is 524288 bytes.
Open On-Chip Debugger 0.10.0-dev-00254-g696fc0a (2016-04-10-10:13)
Licensed under GNU GPL v2
For bug reports, read
	http://openocd.org/doc/doxygen/bugs.html
debug_level: 1
adapter speed: 10000 kHz
cortex_m reset_config sysresetreq
Error: unable to find CMSIS-DAP device

the selected serial port 
 does not exist or your board is not connected

This report would have more information with
"Show verbose output during compilation"
option enabled in File -> Preferences.

Best regards

Marcin

[Rune Holmgren]

Hi,

I am a bit confused. Our nRF5 series devices are not Arduinos and can't run code for Arduino. The development kits are just pin-compatible with Arduino shields since we placed all the pins in the same locations.

As for free compilers, we support the Segger Embedded Studio IDE which you get a free license for when you use it with a Nordic Semiconductor device as well as ARM GCC in the command line.

Best regards,
Rune Holmgren

[Marcin Brylak]

Thank you for your answer.

I guess there is some missunderstanding. I would like to programm the Red Bear BLE Nano 2 module in combination with DAPLink USB board. There are various tutorial, which suggest that BLE examples can be imported to Arduino IDE. Further it suggests to use the Arudio IDE for compiling the BLE Nano 2. I followed the instruction steps, but still i experienced the error message from above while uploading the script to the device. Do you have any suggestions? 

Best regards.

Marcin

[Rune Holmgren]

Very sorry for the long delay. Nordic support staff has been on Easter vacation on and off, and this was unfortunately left unassigned without anyone noticing. I am guessing you might have figured it out in the meanwhile, but I wanted to clarify here for anyone stumbling upon this question in the future.

There exist third-party solutions for compiling Arduino projects with an nRF5 device as the target, but none of these are official solutions which Nordic has tested properly and are experienced enough to help you set up. You will most likely have to reach out to the developer community behind the Arduino solution you are using, as they are much more experienced on that particular solution than us.

Best regards,
Rune Holmgren