Raspberry Pi 4 and nRF52810 Compatibility

[Dylan V]

Hello,

I am looking to start an independent project this month. One of the tasks will be to use BLE to relay information from a custom PCB board with the nRF52810 chip to a device such as a Raspberry Pi. 

I know that Raspberry Pi 4 has BLE compatibility, but I was wondering if this specific chip would work with the on-board Raspberry Pi bluetooth chip.

Thanks in advance and sorry if a similar question has already been asked.

Dylan

[Simonr]

Hi Dylan

All BLE products should be able to communicate with one another, so there shouldn't be any problems having an nRF52810 transceiving data to/from a Raspberry Pi 4.

Best regards,

Simon

[Dylan V]

Hi Simon, 

Thanks for your response!

I am trying to figure out if the PCB needs a micro-controller with "client side" code to send data to the raspberry pi.

Is there any way to connect with the BLE chip without needing to have c level code to establish a connection from the BLE chip side?

Is there some low level code that runs on start up on the BLE chip and is this accessible from an external BLE device (eg raspberry pi)?

The goal of this sub-project would be to just to figure out if the BLE chip is on. I was wondering if I could scan for "on" ble chips from the raspberry pi without needing to have any client side code on the PCB?

Thanks again for your time,

Dylan

[Simonr]

Hi Dylan

The nRF52810 is not shipped with an application already flashed onto it, so you would have to at least flash and download one of our example projects in order to make sure that it is on and transmitting on the BLE network. Luckily, there isn't any actual programming necessary to make one of the examples run on nRF52810 hardware. All you have to do will be to transfer an emulated project (PCA10040e) to be nRF52810 compatible. This is done by removing the DEVELOP_IN_NRF52832 and NRFX_COREDEP_DELAY_US_LOOP_CYCLES defines from the compile flag in the IDE you're using.

You will need a J-Link debugger or an nRF5 DK in order to be able to flash this onto your board however.

Best regards,

Simon

[Dylan V]

Great!

Thanks for your answer. I am assuming this would work for both the nRF52810 and nRF52840 since they are from the same family of chips?

Best,

Dylan

[Simonr]

Hi Dylan. If you're using nRF52840 hardware, you don't even have to transfer an emulated project, as we have example projects that are fully compatible with the nRF52840 from scratch. You can just flash the .hex file from the YOUR_SDK_FOLDER\examples\ble_peripheral\ble_app_beacon\hex file in the SDK (for any example). This has to be the pca_10056 version for it to be compatible with the nRF52840.

Best regards,

Simon