NRF SDK Application having BLE Beacon scanning & Connection support

[mayank_patel]

Hi,

I have one custom board based on imx6ull, which has nrf52840 embedded on it. Both communicates over serial/UART.

On host side I'm using linux Bluez stack v5.50 and on nrf52840 Zephyr v2.1.0.

My use-case is that I have to scan the BLE beacons and also need to connect to them, For that I'm using Zephyr's 'hci_uart' sample application on nrf52840 which exposes 'hci0' interface

on my custom board.

On my board I have written one test application which uses Bluez stack APIs and it will use 'hci0' interface for the beacon scanning and connection/pairing.

Now, Instead of using Zephyr's 'hci_uart' app, I wanted to move to the nrf SDK based application.

Q1 : Is there any application exist in nrf SDK, which can suffice my above two requirements (Beacon scanning + Connection/Pairing) ?

Q2 : Is there any advantage if i will switch to nrf SDK based app from zephyr based app or I can continue with using Zephyr application ?

Q3 : If there is any nrf SDK app available then can anyone please guide me how I can integrate that with nrf52840 and in my test application ? (I have referred ble_connectivity & ble_app_uart_c).

Thanks,

Mayank

[Håkon Alseth]

Hi,

 

 

Q1 : Is there any application exist in nrf SDK, which can suffice my above two requirements (Beacon scanning + Connection/Pairing) ?

 We do have applications that can advertise as ibeacon, but without any form of dynamic configuration, unfortunately. For scanning, please see this thread: https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/f/nordic-q-a/52703/development-of-beacon-scanner-using-nrf

We do not have a standardized hci that is pluggable into bluez, but we have a pc-ble-driver, which unfortunately isn't supported officially for ARM targets (see supported ARCH targets here: https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/pc-ble-driver#Compiling-pc-ble-driver-on-Ubuntu-Linux-or-macOS)

Q2 : Is there any advantage if i will switch to nrf SDK based app from zephyr based app or I can continue with using Zephyr application ?

I would recommend that you investigate both and choose the one that fits your application the best. As pc-ble-driver isn't fully tested on the ARM architecture, I cannot say if it will run as intended.

Q3 : If there is any nrf SDK app available then can anyone please guide me how I can integrate that with nrf52840 and in my test application ? (I have referred ble_connectivity & ble_app_uart_c).

No direct guide, unfortunately.

The documentation for the nRF5 SDK is available here:

https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/topic/sdk_nrf5_v17.0.0/nrf51_setups_serialization.html?cp=7_1_1_4 

And the documentation for pc-ble-driver is available here:

https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/pc-ble-driver/blob/master/README.md

 

Kind regards,

Håkon

[mayank_patel]

Thanks Hakon Alseth for the quick answer,

Got your point regarding pc-ble-driver, These answers has cleared my doubts.