How to interface with NUART from PC?

[engineer287]

nRF devices have a proprietary service called Nordic UART which provides a similar functionality to SPP (Serial Port Profile) of Bluetooth Classic but over BLE.  
Now, for SPP over BL Classic, we could just use a normal serial terminal like PuTTY or minicom and consider the link a serial device.  
Problem is, we can't do that with NUART.   

1- How to interface to a NUART link (which is over BLE) from host? (Specifically a GNU/Linux PC)  

2- Nordic has an Android app which is quite comprehensive in functionalities: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=no.nordicsemi.android.mcp&hl=en&gl=US
Adafruit has a similar one which IMO has a better UART mode handling: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adafruit.bluefruit.le.connect&hl=en&gl=US
But for PC side with GNU/Linux or Windows, I don't find any similar apps!  Is there a program or any scripts?  

Note that I'm not looking for any HW solutions like dongles and such. I have a BLE node (nRF52832) transmitting data over NUART (BLE) and I want to send/receive/watch data on my terminal on Linux (or a program).

[awneil]

github.com/.../pc-ble-driver

[engineer287]

Thanks for your reply, however I don't think that repo is what I'm looking for. 

pc-ble-driver consists of a set of static and shared libraries that provide SoftDevice functionality to the application via serial port communication with an nRF5 connectivity chip running the SoftDevice and connectivity software...

In that repo, the application is running on host (e.g. GNU/Linux) and the BLE functionality is augmented to it through an external HW dongle (nRF5 connectivity chip) which uses the dongle's serial port as the communication layer. 

What I want, is to directly communicate with the target (nRF52832) through the BLE layer using the host's own bluetooth driver (Realtek combined module or whatever).

Problem is, for modules like HC05, with SPP over classic BL, the profile is "emulated" and served as a (virtual) Serial Port.  But for NUART, this can't be done. Hence I'm looking for a script/program/software to do the same thing. 

This functionality is available in GUI mode via the Nordic/Adafruit android apps I mentioned but I can't find similar thing for Linux/Window.

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Hi,

We do not have any applications that interfaces with the built-in BLE of the host, all our Windows/Linux tools (nRF Connect, pc-ble-driver, etc.) runs through an external dongle, where we have control over what is supported.

You may check out the suggestions in this thread.

Best regards,
Jørgen

[awneil]

engineer287 said:

using the host's own bluetooth driver

In that case, it's just the standard Windows APIs:

docs.microsoft.com/.../bluetooth-low-energy-overview

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/samples/microsoft/windows-universal-samples/bluetoothle/

EDIT

Similarly for linux; eg, https://www.jaredwolff.com/get-started-with-bluetooth-low-energy/