How can I connect an nRF52840 with a computer over Bluetooth 5?

RE: How can I connect an nRF52840 with a computer over Bluetooth 5?

Hung Bui — Tue, 22 May 2018 14:59:14 GMT

Hi Kevin,

nRF52832 does support 2Mbps. The only thing missing is long range. If you want long range you would need to use nRF52840.

You are correct that nRF52Dongle is not available yet. But we will have new dongle running on nRF52840 released in a few weeks.

For your requirements, I would suggest to use our nRF52840 DK to connect to the PC via USB, and use pc-ble-driver we provide here to communicate with external nRF52 boards. It's the easiest way to utilize all new features on Bluetooth 5.0

The default BLE driver on PC usually a little bit slow to be updated with latest Bluetooth 5.0 features.

RE: How can I connect an nRF52840 with a computer over Bluetooth 5?

KevinL — Tue, 22 May 2018 09:55:00 GMT

Thank you so far.

My pc does have BLE (I think it's 4.0), but that also means I can't use features introduced later. I'm looking to stream data. The amount of data is small enough for BLE to be fast enough for my application, with the added benefit of energy consumption.

Regardless, due to the headers it would be beneficial to maximize throughput. So I would like to use the 2 Msym/s mode and extended ATT packet length extension. The latter should already be available in Bluetooth 4.2.

I would also prefer to be able to use the long range features for testing purposes.

Am I correct that the nRF52 DK has Bluetooth 5 without the long range feature? So to be able to test long range and 2Msym/s, I would need another nRF52840 PDK?

You mention a nRF52x dongle, could you provide a link to this as I cannot find it?

RE: How can I connect an nRF52840 with a computer over Bluetooth 5?

Hung Bui — Tue, 22 May 2018 09:18:08 GMT

What exactly the feature you are looking for when you mention about "Bluetooth 5" ? Would it be fine with Bluetooth 4.0 or 4.2 ?

Note that Bluetooth 5.0 is backward compatible with 4.x

Our device should be able to communicate with any PC that has Bluetooth 4.x.

Of course you can use our nRF52x dongle/DK and connect it to your PC to communicate with other nRF52. But it will add up the cost for your solution.