Can we use the nRF52840 Dongle be used as a BLE Bluetooth 5 "central" mode adapter in Linux?

[Harry Andrei]

Is there a firmware file you have that allows the dongle to function as a central for BLE with bluetooth 5 completely standalone. We don't want to have to use nrfConnect or anything third party. We just want to plug it in to the USB drive like a Bluetooth 4 adapter and then our system can find it and use hcitool or bluetoothctl to connect/read the central. We then want to be able to connect to other devices. This all works with a bluetooth 4 BLE adapter. But the dongle is not working unless we use nRF Connect.

The target OS is Ubutu18.04 on an ARM based board.

[Turbo J]

The Zephyr project has example code that can do just that when using Linux as the Host OS. Not directly supported from Nordic, though.

See this blog post.