Nordic provide a BLE USB dongle for applications running on a PC?

[brianreinhold]

Does Nordic provide a BLE functionality with a USB dongle that a PC application can use? I do NOT want to use the Windows 10 BLE as it is buggy and does not provide the low level control I need. I am writing an extensive health device BLE test suite for centrals and I do not want to download HEX files onto a chip for each test. What is needed is to call the BLE APIs from the PC application and get signaled of BLE events in the PC application. I am thinking Visual Studio 19 using C or C++. I am forced to select things in the product and I will pick something at random. I have no idea which one will do. Pretty stupid requirement on Nordic's part.

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Hi,

pc-ble-driver should meet your requirements. This is a C/C++ library for serializing our BLE softdevices. You can use it together with our nRF52840 Dongle (PCA10059).

Best regards,
Jørgen

[brianreinhold]

I looked at the instructions on git hub for the pc-ble-driver which seems incredibly complex,  requiring installation of all kinds of software that I have never heard of, setting up numerous environment variables, and then one still installs a HEX file. Besides the chances of getting one of those steps wrong (since I have no idea what I am doing - just following a sequence of cookbook steps) is this still for writing C-based BLE applications that run on the PC? If so, what does that lengthy installation procedure accomplish? If I had some idea of what I am doing perhaps the chances of success are better....