RE: Invisible beacon (Peripheral) at Ultra low power and able to make DFU over the air from Reader (Central)

Hung Bui — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 11:42:10 GMT

Hi,

For new application we suggest you to start your development with nRF52 series. nRF51 is older and we stopped development of any new feature with this series. The nRF52810 has very similar price range to nRF51 and offer much better features and lower power consumption.

1. Bluetooth Advertising is public and can be scanned by any BLE device. So it's not possible to make your beacon packet visible to your scanner but not other BLE scanner. What you can do is to encrypt your data and use resolvable address (address that 's regenerate periodically) to protect your privacy. You can consider using EID with EddyStone ,have a look here.

2. Yes, it's practical. We had seen our customer made their beacons with 10 years battery life. It's just how big the battery can be :) You can calculate your power consumption base on the interval here. A 2450/2477 coincell battery with 600mAh/1000mAh should be enough for your application to last 3 year+ with 1 second interval.

3. You would need to advertise not only in beacon mode but also in normal mode once in a while to wait for the command to tell your device to enter DFU mode. This will result of little bit more power consumption.