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Sending and receiving beacons on demand.

Our device using nRF52840 is running an external (non-BT) radio most of the time. We need to send and receive data In between operations of this other radio.  At any given time, there will be one sender and multiple receivers.  Since there will be no BLE connection or interaction, this is essentially a beacon operation except for the scheduling.  We are trying to understand if it is possible to manually send and receive without running a BLE schedule and without any interaction between sender and receiver.  

We are assuming/hoping this will be possible using L2CAP functions instead of GAP/GATT functions and never starting any GATT scheduling.  However the L2CAP message sequence charts in SD140 v7.0.1 all show two-way communication.

Please clarify how the scheme described here can be accomplished.

The overall schedule will be something like

Receive-only devices:

  1. Receive other radio
  2. Receive BLE (20-40ms interval)
  3. (repeat steps 1 & 2 indefinitely)

Receive/Transmit devices:

  1. Receive other radio
  2. Receive BLE (20-40ms interval)
  3. (repeat steps 1 & 2 N times)
  4. Transmit other radio
  5. Transmit BLE
  6. (repeat steps 1 - 5 indefinitely)
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  • Hello,

    What size is the data that you are looking to broadcast on the BLE transmit?
    As you said, the beacon functionality might be useful for your application.
    Beacons broadcast their data as part of the Manufacturer Specific Data field of their advertising packages.
    Have you seen the BLE Beacon example? If you are not familiar with advertising in BLE, I suggest reading this short tutorial.
    The main things for you to note here is the limited size of advertising packets, and that you may change your advertising interval period, to configure how often the transmits happen.

    Since I do not know what other radio protocol you are using, I assume that you know you have sufficient time to switch between BLE and the other radio.

    We are assuming/hoping this will be possible using L2CAP functions instead of GAP/GATT functions and never starting any GATT scheduling.  However the L2CAP message sequence charts in SD140 v7.0.1 all show two-way communication.

    Is this only because you want to have a non-connectable, broadcasting device?
    If you, I think the beacon functionality might be what you are looking for.

    Please have a look at the BLE Beacon & Advertising tutorial, and get back to me with how you think this might fit with your application.

    Best regards,
    Karl

     

Reply
  • Hello,

    What size is the data that you are looking to broadcast on the BLE transmit?
    As you said, the beacon functionality might be useful for your application.
    Beacons broadcast their data as part of the Manufacturer Specific Data field of their advertising packages.
    Have you seen the BLE Beacon example? If you are not familiar with advertising in BLE, I suggest reading this short tutorial.
    The main things for you to note here is the limited size of advertising packets, and that you may change your advertising interval period, to configure how often the transmits happen.

    Since I do not know what other radio protocol you are using, I assume that you know you have sufficient time to switch between BLE and the other radio.

    We are assuming/hoping this will be possible using L2CAP functions instead of GAP/GATT functions and never starting any GATT scheduling.  However the L2CAP message sequence charts in SD140 v7.0.1 all show two-way communication.

    Is this only because you want to have a non-connectable, broadcasting device?
    If you, I think the beacon functionality might be what you are looking for.

    Please have a look at the BLE Beacon & Advertising tutorial, and get back to me with how you think this might fit with your application.

    Best regards,
    Karl

     

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