ble app uart communication between nrf52832 peripheral and nrf52840 Central

[vigneshms]

Dear community members

I have end nodes with nrf52832 (Soft device s132) that can communicate to a central nrf52832 DK in Connection mode based on ble app uart and multiple peripheral examples. The central DK board currently connects to a raspberry pi over uart for sending data to the Internet. I would like to know if I can replace the nrf52832 DK with a nrf52840 dongle to cut down cost and reduce size. I hope the soft device version on the dongle would be s140 - is it possible to establish multiple connections between a nrf52832 (S132) peripheral device and nrf52840(s140) Central device. Any help in this regard will be highly appreciated. 

Regards

Vignesh

[Edvin]

Hello,

The nRF52840 Dongle doesn't have regular IOs on the USB part, and it doesn't have a debugger on board. This means that it will not be able to get UART communication out of this port. 

If you intend to buy a lot of these, you can consider to invest in one nRF52840 DK to create an application that uses the USB port instead of UART to transmit the NUS messages. There is an example that does this located in SDK\examples\peripheral\usbd_ble_uart

It uses does basically the same as ble_app_uart, but uses the USB peripheral instead of UART. (the nRF52832 doesn't have a USB peripheral). 

Once your application for the nRF52840 is up and running, you can port it to the nRF52840 dongle.

The reason I recommend you to go with the nRF52840 DK first is that the dongle doesn't have an on board programmer, so it is a bit difficult to develop applications on the dongle itself, and since only the nRF52840 has the USB peripheral, I recommend you to use the nRF52840 DK to write your application.

Best regards,

Edvin

[awneil]

Edvin said:

The nRF52840 DK (sic) doesn't have ... a debugger on board.

You mean the Dongle doesn't have these.

vigneshms: The DK does have them - which is why it's the better option for developing (the clue is in the name!)