Need help choosing between ANT/ANT+ and BLE

RE: Need help choosing between ANT/ANT+ and BLE

Petter Myhre — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:44:45 GMT

Thank you for updating your question.

Ok, if I have understood you correctly you want each node to send around 30 bytes of data to all surrounding nodes. It doesn't seem that you want to relay the received information.

With BLE you have two options, if you want to be a broadcaster and an observer. You can use the S130, but this is currently in the alpha stage. Or you can use the Concurrent Multi-protocol Timeslot API in the S110 7.0.0 SoftDevice. Please see this example on GitHub. In BLE, the maximum user payload of an advertising packet is 29 bytes, which is a good fit your requirement of 30 bytes.

With ANT the maximum user payload is 8 byte. ANT has RSSI, see this question. With ANT this could simply be set up by having one master broadcast channel, and one Background Scanning Channel on each device.

If you find any of the mentioned questions useful please vote on them.

RE: Need help choosing between ANT/ANT+ and BLE

SergP — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 19:37:48 GMT

I have replied your questions, do you have any opinions/suggestions?

RE: Need help choosing between ANT/ANT+ and BLE

Petter Myhre — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 08:18:46 GMT

Do you have any realtime requirements? Are all nodes talking to all nodes, or do you have another network topology? Where does the information come from? A user? A specific node? A random node? Can you edit your answer to include some information that can answer these questions? Thanks.