Bluetooth 5 Expansion module for Raspberry 5

[mrmrtowers]

Hello

For my final year project at Varsity I am creating my own smartwatch + edge computing IoT system. The watch and infrastructure needs to be as low-cost as possible to potentially deploy on a much larger scale. I am using a Raspberry Pi to collect data from the watches. Im hoping to use Bluetooth 5 instead of BLE 4.2, where or how could I get the Raspberry Pi to receive Bluetooth 5?

[Bjørn Kvaale]

You could take a look at the serialization documentation where an nrf52 dev kit is used to enable Bluetooth 5 connectivity & the data from the smartwatch is sent to the nrf52 & then relayed to the Raspberry Pi, which collects & stores the data. You can either use UART or SPI wired connections to communicate between the nrf52 &  the Raspberry Pi. Seems like you can use both UART or SPI on the Raspberry Pi, but take a look at the website links & the example code to double check this.

[mrmrtowers]

Thank you so much for getting back to me! I have purchased a RedBear Nano V2 Which uses the nRF52 series. Do you know if its possible to convert this into a USB Bluetooth 5 Dongle? And if so could you provide the necessary starting points in the documentation? thanks so much for the help

[Bjørn Kvaale]

Unfortunately, I do not believe this will work (see link). But we do have a new graviton dongle, which is based on the 52840 chip.

[mrmrtowers]

I'm going to have a look at using UART as the DAPlink acts as a a UART-USB bridge. I'm using a RedBear Nano V2