nRF5340 BLE Host for RTOS-/Zephyr-Free development

[Pascal Künzi]

Hi all,

For the nRF5340 we are reusing/porting functionality from our previous nRF SoC's development and thus work on a bare-metal implementation. We are using the nrfx library and the SoftDevice Controller as suggested in other devzone entries and webinars.

This not only saves us a lot of overhead and complexity in tools and code from the Zephyr Project and nRF Connect SDK environment, but also allows easy development in the IAR Embedded Workbench instead of having to use the Segger Embedded Studio.

Being able to use our nRF SoC knowledge and using our tools has been quite convinient so far. Unfortunately, the SoftDevice Controller functionality is different and now requires a Bluetooth Host implementation compared to the previous nRF5 SDK SoftDevices.

In your documentation about the SoftDevice Controller here, you have an architecture diagram showing the integration in an RTOS-free environment.

Developing our own Bluetooth Host seems exaggerated and barely feasible. Are you planning on providing a Bluetooth Host that can be used in RTOS-free development or is there a Bluetooth Host you suggest for that use case?

A similar question has been asked in this devzone entry, more than a year ago. Are there any news that could be shared regarding that?

I am looking forward to your response!

Regards,
Pascal

[JONATHAN LL]

Hi,

Are you planning on providing a Bluetooth Host that can be used in RTOS-free development

Currently we don't have any news on this.  So the answer is more or les the same as in the post from one year ago that you linked to, at least for now.

And as far as suggestions for other third party we i don't have any specifics. 

If you want to put some request on such a feature then i recommend that you contact your regional sales manger and ask through there.  

Regards,
Jonathan

[Pascal Künzi]

Hi Jonathan,

Thank you for the fast reply.

Since you don't have a Bluetooth host you can suggest for us, what was the intention of the architecture diagram shown in your documentation? The use case of someone implementing their own Bluetooth Host sounds like a tremendous task and looking online, I couldn't find any RTOS agnostic implementations.

I will contact our RSM and ask about that.

As this will probably take quite some time, if it is even checked, is there a different approach we can take in the meantime?
Do you think it is feasible, that we extract and modify the Zephyr Bluetooth host to fit our needs?

Or is there a repository of the previous nRF5 SoftDevices that we could extract the host from?

Regards,
Pascal

[JONATHAN LL]

Hi,
I can help clarify some things here, but don't have a good answer.  

Pascal Künzi said:

is there a different approach we can take in the meantime?

Don't think there is no easy answer here but I would recommend to port your "old" code to Zephyr. I believe that to be the simplest solution. You don't have to use SEGGER if you don't want, there are other options like C-make and Ozone for debugging as an example. 

 

Pascal Künzi said:

Do you think it is feasible, that we extract and modify the Zephyr Bluetooth host to fit our needs?

Not sure if anyone ha tried this but i assume it is a "backwards" solution that is quite hefty. I would ask in e Zephyr forum for more clarification on this but I assume that it is not he best bet.   

Pascal Künzi said:

Or is there a repository of the previous nRF5 SoftDevices that we could extract the host from?

The SD is closed so this is not possible. 

 

 Regards,
Jonathan