NRF52 master + Bluez and BLE HCI_USB (ideas for a project)

[caveman]

Hello,

I'm doing some research for a product my company wants to develop. It will be a BLE central that needs to connect with ~ 30 BLE peripherals.
The peripherals will send aprox. 3200 bytes/second each, using notifications and the central will forward the data to a computer, where Linux and other software will run
(we need to use Linux and cannot change that)

We already have a peripheral running and sending data. It was tested with different centrals (linux bluez, android and nrf52 dongle) and the result is good.

For the central we're thinking about: A) Linux (Bluez) or B) another nrf52 dealing with all the BLE communication and sending data to the PC using USB.

I prefer the Bluez way but (I know this is not a bluez/Linux list, but maybe people have experience with this):

- we need to know how many connections the BLE controller can support and we're not able to find this information for laptops/desktops. Is there a way to discover this?

- if we cannot connect 30 devices we could add more controllers using USB ports, but the problem is the same. Trial and error is dangerous

- we could use Nordic dongles with Zephyr + BLE HCI_USB


So my questions are:

1.  can a nrf52 central support this data rate + USB communication?
2.  is there a way to know how many connections a BLE controller supports?
3.  how many peripherals Zephyr + BLE HCI_USB can support?
4.  maybe there's a better solution using Zephyr? We never worked with Zephyr but we're open to learn.

Any suggestions/ideas are greatly appreciated!

Thank you!
 

[caveman]

Any help from Nordic here, please?

[Håkon Alseth]

Hi,

 

We haven't done testing wrt. throughput in the scenario where you're running 20 concurrent roles. 

I would recommend that you try this out and see if it meets your requirements.

You could try to reach out to the zephyr community to hear if they have more information related to your question.

 

As mtsunstrum mentions, getting 3.2kByte/s (~25kBit/s) in a 30-to-1 network is highly unlikely, so you might have to distribute this out over more than one central.

 

Kind regards,

Håkon