Custom program to talk to PCA10059

[Chad]

During manufacturing verification we want to run some tests that will require us to talk to our custom nRF52840 device over bluetooth.

The ideal solution for us would be to use the PCA10059 nRF52840 dongle loaded with the same firmware that is required for the "Bluetooth Low Energy" app in the desktop version "nRF Connect" to work.

Are there instructions for interacting with the dongle firmware? Could I open a virtual COM port on my computer and send it commands to get the RSSI of advertising devices, and then connect to a device, query the services, and then interact with the services?

Could I write my own python application to interact with the dongle just as the "nRF Connect" program does?

I know this could be done with a PCA10056 DK, infact we have done that and use it as an internal tool. But for giving to our manufacturing partner we would rather not have one of our internal tools be a key component of their verification process.

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

You can communicate with the PCA10059 on a PC using the pc-ble-driver, or one of the wrappers. This is what is done by for instance pc-nrfconnect-ble. If you want to make a general BLE test setup it might be better to use another BLE dongle with an HCI interface which is natively supported by the OS, as that would allow you to write scritps/applications using generic Bluetooth API's, for instance, pybluez.