Dual Mode Wireless on nRF51822

[Luke]

I'm working on a wireless sensor network and was thinking about using nRF51822 as the primary SoC. For my network it would primarily be low power sensors talking to one another over a proprietary RF link but that it would be nice if any one of the nodes in the mesh could connect to a iPhone via BLE and bridge communication over to the rest of the mesh. Is that possible with nRF51822?

[Marc Nicholas]

Yes, entirely possible with the '51822.

A couple of comments:

(1) Don't underestimate how hard it can be to implement your own mesh networking protocol! (2) You will "reset" the BLE connection every time you take over the radio for your own protocol.

-m

[Ole Morten]

As Marc says, this should be possible to do on an nRF51822, but we don't have any mesh protocol examples for it, so this is something you'd have to make yourself. Making a mesh protocol can be a complicated task, but should be doable.

An option if you need to avoid the disruption on the BLE link could be to use the nRF51922, which is capable of keeping a BLE connection while doing ANT data transfers. ANT is also not a mesh protocol, but would make it possible to make simple networks relaying information.

[David Edwin]

There is a sample mesh protocol available on the nRF51 at https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/nRF51-ble-bcast-mesh , this can be used to enhance your understanding of the mesh with BTLE. Feel free to contribute and comment.