Can the nRF52840 dongle be used as a Bluetooth 5.0 peripheral via Raspberry Pi 3 running linux

[Kenny]

Hi all, can the nRF52840 dongle be used as an external Bluetooth 5.0 peripheral  via a Raspberry Pi 3 running Linux?

I received this message from my engineer

'The drivers in question are USB ACM CDC class effectively UART and not full blown HCI level, so whilst it would allow a USB port to talk with the development boards it wouldn’t contain the full Bluetooth stack to act like a typical Bluetooth dongle.

If its not possible to use nRF52840 via nRF Connect is there firmware available to allow the nRF52840 to act like a typical dongle?

thanks

[Martin Rev]

Aurele

Aurele said:

i'm also very interested by using HCI-USB with nordic nrf52840 dongle since i'm developing a gateway. Is there some nordic user that tried the sample application given in the previous post and that could give me some feedback about it ?

I just tried it with the dongle and a RPI zero W as host (USB OTG cable). It worked find and I could use bluetoothctl to scan another BLE device (BL 4.2 - another pi zero W). Right now it its difficult to determine if the host supports the COded Phy features 

[Aurele]

Hello Martin,

Thank you very much for the feedback. We also succeeded to make it work with a yocto platform and it seems to work very well. This only drawbacks is the radio range that is quite low. I ll try to make my own board with a nrf52840 and a power amplifier in the coming month.

Thx again

[Martin Rev]

We tested a module from Laird and the range was very good. You can find some documents on their site including their range test. Worth looking at if you don't have to design your own module.