Streaming data from exercise bike service with NRF52840 dongle + raspberry pi 4

[mileseverett]

Hello

I am new to all of this and am wondering if this is possible, and if anyone can point me in the right direction if it is. I am looking to create an open source project to turn a cheaper yet equal quality spin bike into a peloton like experience with just a raspberry pi and a cheap dongle. I have all of the skills to complete the project apart from actually reading the data from the bike.

The exercise bike has a service which I am able to read from using the app that I would like to read from at some interval 0.2s maybe or faster if possible, this service is shown from the nRFConnect app below. I would like to work with the data in Python but am open to using other languages with some kind of socket connection for transferring data if it would be easier. I also have the nRF52 development kit but am not sure how it would be integrated. I have seen some things about soldering which I am not particularly knowledgeable about so would prefer to avoid if possible.

I would really appreciate any advice or hints in the right direction. I expected the bluetooth part of this project to be simple but has caused weeks of frustration.

Thanks in advance

Miles

[Vidar Berg]

Hello Miles,

I don't have that much experience with BLE on Pi4 to be honest, but doesn't it come with a built-in BLE chipset you can use?  In that case, maybe you can try out existing python modules such as this one: https://github.com/hbldh/bleak.

I'm not sure if the library above supports pairing/bonding. That's also something to consider if your peripheral requires it.

Best regards,

Vidar

Edit: forgot to add that it may be an option to use our pc-ble-driver-py with the nRF52840. The problem is that we are not testing this implementation on ARM, only x86. The libraries will also need to be built from source.

[mileseverett]

Hey, big appreciation for the response!

I was having a lot of issues with the bleak library being a bit inconsistent so decided to go for something with more of an active community. If I understand you correctly, if I have the pc-ble-driver-py module installed, I would be able to use it along with the dongle without having to do any extra soldering/c programming? If the ARM chipset is an issue, then i'm sure I can find a low power x86 board.

Additionally, i've seen that there is javascript drivers, https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/pc-ble-driver-js/releases do you know if these have also only been tested on x86?

Thanks in advance!

Miles

[Vidar Berg]

You can plug the dongle into the USB port, so no soldering should be needed.

The Javascript and python implementation are both wrappers for the actual driver library (pc-ble-driver) implemented in C++, and it is this C++ libary that must be compiled for ARM. I have built and run this on a Raspberry in the past, but the build system has changed a bit since then, so I'm not sure if still easy to do.

Best regards,

Vidar

[mileseverett]

Thank you so much! Issue closed