Two Peripherals Without Central

[watashi16]

I've got a use case that can essentially be boiled down to two battery-powered devices that have a button and an LED; when the user presses a button on device 1, the LEDs on both devices toggle; the same thing happens when the user presses a button on device 2.

Battery life is important, so I'd like to avoid having one of them act as a central.

I'm struggling trying to find a good approach to this--is there an obvious solution I'm missing? Is there a good resource for determining my power consumption as a central if I need to do that?

[Fred]

If you want to determine power, Nordic's "Online Power Profiler" might be a good start.

Your concern as to not having one act as a central is of course correct if you would like to minimize power consumption; since you would not know when the button is pressed and you want to have a quick response I guess, it seems the connection must be established with a small connection interval to get responsive two-way communication.

So, I even wonder whether BLE might be the way to go for this application as it is the core assumption for BLE that the Scanner/Central is a device with relative more power.

If I would be to design such a system I would look into designing a simple wireless protocol (alternating Rx-Tx, i.e. ping-pong like) with the interval equal to the response time you would require. You could still use the nR52 for that though ;-)