Use nRF52840 dongle as BLE Gateway

[Andre]

Hello team Nordic Semi. Just got in touch with nRF52840 and it looks like an awesome tool.

Is it compatible with 4.0 BLE ?

Im working with beacons and im thinking of buying some of the nRF52840 dongle to serve as a beacon gateway plugged to my Raspberry 3B. (I know RPi has built-in BLE, but i want to use a dongle in order to increase range and even work with a BLE mesh forwarding the project).

So the dongle would read Advertising packets coming from beacons and the raspbian application would send it a http server. But my beacons are BLE 4.0, is there any problem?

What should i purchase to start developing? Is the nRF52840 dongle and the nRF52840-DK enough?

Any help is appreciated. Thank you!

[Øyvind]

Hello,

Welcome to DevZone and the world of Nordic Semiconductor. Great to hear that you are interested in our nRF52840. 

I recommend looking at Nordic Semi Infocenter, our online documentation, and especially the Welcome section with some tips and tricks on how to browse the pages. 

Is it compatible with 4.0 BLE ?

 Yes, Nordic Semi BLE is compatible with Bluetooth v4.0 BLE. More information about the Nordic Semi Bluetooth Stack can be found under the SoftDevice section in the infocenter.

Im working with beacons and im thinking of buying some of the nRF52840 dongle to serve as a beacon gateway plugged to my Raspberry 3B. (I know RPi has built-in BLE, but i want to use a dongle in order to increase range and even work with a BLE mesh forwarding the project).

First I have to point out that using the Raspberry Pi and nRF52840 dongle is not an "out of the box" solution. Have a look at our nRF52840 Dongle Programming Tutorial, and the answer to your question. A solution to get the dongle to work on the Raspberry Pi would be to use the PC BLE Driver which consists of a set of static and shared libraries that provide SoftDevice functionality to the application via serial port communication with an nRF5 connectivity chip running the SoftDevice and connectivity software.

There have been others looking for similar solutions with the nRF52840 dongle and Raspberry Pi, have a look at these cases: Case 1, Case 2 and Case 3.

So the dongle would read Advertising packets coming from beacons and the raspbian application would send it a http server. But my beacons are BLE 4.0, is there any problem?

 As long as your beacons are BLE 4.0, there should be no issues. 

What should i purchase to start developing? Is the nRF52840 and the nRF52840-DK enough?

 To test and develop BLE applications alone, I recommend looking at the nRF52840-DK. Regarding the nRF52840 Dongle, please see my answer above.

Kind regards,
Øyvind