Be the cell phone instead of connecting to one.

[BobYoung]

Is it possible to use one of the development kits to simulate a cell phone so that I can test my device's bluetooth pairing, connecting, and communication?

I know I can go the other way and connect a dev kit device to a real cell phone, but I want to evaluate a new device's connection to a phone; without using a phone. This is for a development lab but it might become part of the factory test and they don't want to have a phone as test equipment.

I am just starting to work with nRF51-SDK from a windows machine but I am open to other suggestions. 

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

The nRF devices can have all BLE roles. Typically (though not always), phones act as BLE centrals. Also, phones more often act as GATT clients rater than GATT servers. However, any combination is possible, both on the phone side an the nRF side. Since you can implement everything on a nRF, there is no problem simulating a phone if this is what you mean. You can start by looking at some of the BLE Central examples that can be used together with a BLE Peripheral exmaple.

[BobYoung]

I am very new to bluetooth. I want to make sure that it will work with a device under test that is not BLE - one using a legacy bluetooth stack. I am not sure right now the profiles that they are using but I know that they started using bluetooth in an older product before BLE was adopted and they are using similar older code in this new product.

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

BobYoung said:

I want to make sure that it will work with a device under test that is not BLE - one using a legacy bluetooth stack.

I see. Note that the nRF HW is not capable of Bluetooth classic, so it cannot communicate with a Bluetooth classic device in any way. However, it is not a problem for a phone to be connected to both a BLE and a Bluetooth classic device at the same time, if that is what you mean.

BobYoung said:

I am not sure right now the profiles that they are using but I know that they started using bluetooth in an older product before BLE was adopted and they are using similar older code in this new product.

Most Bluetooth classic profiles do not exist for BLE. But you could use a custom set of (custom) services if the product does not match a standard profile. The app on the phone could then handle both in a way that is transparent for the end-user.