No BLE stack inside Win 7?

[Milan]

Hi all,

Could you recommend a way of connecting the nRF51422 with PC or laptop running Win7? It seems that there is no BLE stack for Win7 and thus can't connect. I am looking for a solution perhaps a dongle that could be seen as a serial port in Win7 and handle the BLE stack on its own. Is there a solution for this and do you see any issues with it?

Many thanks for replies.

Milan

[Alex]

I was looking at it recently. One option is to use Bluegiga BLE dongle and their bluetooth library. I'm sure Nordic has the same kit for their dongle. Another option is to buy component library with BLE support for Windows. We are using Blue Soleil for classic Bluetooth and they are working on BLE release. But it is expensive. The big difference is that universal component library will work with many BLE adapters/dongles. UPD 23.02.2015 15:50

[Milan]

Thank you at the moment we are going to try the Bluegiga dongle then but would like to find out about Nordic's solution.

[Bjørn Inge]

Maybe you could use the Nordic product called nRF51 Bluetooth Smart Driver? It is a DLL that gives the ability to control an nRF51 dongle or devkit from a Windows PC through a GATT/GAP API. It does not give a standard HCI interface, rather it uses Nordics's proprietary serialization protocol.

[markm]

How well did the Bluegiga BLE dongle work? I'm thinking of using one to communicate with an nRF52 from a Windows 7 computer.

[Alex]

We stopped using it because we moved to W10 but at the time we used it it was fine with nRF51