Re : nRF52832 and dongle commuication

[amur9465]

Hello Everyone,

i have got a steamVR tracker kit which has a bluetooth module  Nordic nRF52832-QFAA 2.4GHz Radio SoC with Cortex M4 Processor  and the trackers are connected through a steam wireless dongle.

i have come to know that dongle supports only one device to be connected at a time.but i am using 8 trackers and i don't want to connect it through 8 USB ports which is inefficient and lot of problems. so i wanted to know if the nRF5240 dongle supports many to one communication and i wanted to know the protocol between them. 

how can i go on connecting 8 trackers sending data to a single wireless dongle.

[amur9465]

what about the nRF24L01+ dongle transreciever IC ??

suppose i use 10 nRF52832 and all are sending data to one nRF24L01+ , will there be a problem with that or do i need to use 1 nRF52832  to its corresponding nRF24L01+ ??  Please help me in answering this so that i can move on with my project.

[Hung Bui]

Hi, 

I'm not sure what you are planning to do with the nRF24L01+ ? Where is the steamVR tracker in the picture? 

Of course 10 nRF52832 can talk to one nRF24L01+ but you need to use ESB/raw Radio protocol, and do some coding, and I don't know how that work with the SteamVR tracker. 

[amur9465]

I cannot change any protocols in staemVR tracker, so planning to build my own tracker where i can use 10 nRF52832 bluetooth module embedded on the tracker communicating with one nRF24L01+ transceiver dongle. thanks a lot for the reply

[amur9465]

Hi,

is it sufficient if i program the nrf52840 dongle and include esb protocol to do multiple communications or do i also need to change some of the things in the nrf52832 chip embedded on the tracker.??

[Hung Bui]

Hi Amur, 

You are saying that you will not use the SteamVR tracker , but building your own tracker with all the sensors on it ? I don't see any problem of that. But you would need to build everything from scratch including the firmware on both the nRF52840 and nRF52832. 

To get started I would suggest you to get familiar with ESB protocol. We have example in our nRF5 SDK v15 here. The idea is to use the dongle as the receiver and your tracker as transmitter. Since you may have more than 8 trackers, you can think of using same address for all trackers and then use one byte in the payload as the ID of the tracker. 

[amur9465]

Hi Hung,

I am confused between using nRF52840 dongle and nRF24lu1+ 

what are the major differences between them??. Are both of them same in working for the application that i am going to use??

which is the best dongle to use for making a bluetooth transceiver dongle to receive data from 10 different trackers??

[Hung Bui]

Both should work. The nRF52840 dongle is not designed for developing application. It's designed as a tool. You need external programmer to program the board. 

You are planing to do a complex task. This is not something "plug and play". I would suggest you to get familiar with all of our tool chain, SDK, softdevice (if you use BLE). Think of a few weeks if you are new to Nordic's developing environment. You should start with our nRF52 DK first. Use 2 nRF52 DKs to talk to each other via ESB. 

I don't suggest you to go with the dongles.