ANT+ bike power capture on 52840 and transfer to 9160

[Brett]

Hi,

The end goal is to run this project on a Thingy91, but I am currently building/testing on the nrf9160dk.

I am looking to capture ANT+ from a bike power meter on the 52840, transfer that data to the 9160 (say via UART), combine it with the GPS data from the 9160 to then upload that to Cloud (AWS/Azure/other). Essentially, building a tracking unit with bike power.
This is the same concept as the old Qollector from quarq which is the same unit as Velon uses for all its data analysts it does for bike races.

I was looking to use the gps example from sdk-nrf, with a UART-serial example (created by Anders Storro - devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../nrf9160dk-offloading-bluetooth-related-tasks-to-nrf52), with ANT+ from the ant_plus/ant_bpwr/bpwr_rx project from nRF5_SDK_17.0.2 (I have this working on a separate nrf52840dk board).

Where I am a bit lost is, how to build or convert the bpwr_rx project so that I can use the Zephyr libraries that are used in the say the hci_uart or the uart_serial project - so I can run it on the 52840 on the 9160dk board. When I tried to do this, I got an error saying it was not a Zephyr project.

I was also looking at the lte_ble_gateway example, but I would still have to convert/build the ant_plus/ant_bpwr/bpwr_rx project to communicate with it.

-brett

[Kenneth]

Hi,

There is no ANT or ANT+ support in zephyr, so you need to use the legacy nRF5 SDK if you want to develop an ANT or ANT+ application:

https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/topic/sdk_nrf5_v17.0.2/ant_examples_bpwr.html

Kenneth

[Brett]

Thanks Kenneth.

I have built the ant+/rx component of the code (with the SDK) and its working fine (testing on a 52840DK).

What would the best way to get this (ant+) data from the nrf9160dk_52840 to the nrf9160dk_9160. Thats where I was hoping a simple UART component could work, just like a serial type connection, or is there a better way to get comms between the 2 chips ?  Any examples to do a data transfer between the these chips.

I looked at the nrf9160dk_9160/lte_ble_gateway as an example, but wasnt sure on the UART connection from the nrf9160dk_52840 - specifically if there was an example from the nRF SDK I could use that would work.

The goal is to run this all on a Thingy91 - so I want to make sure the project will actually work...

-brett

[Kenneth]

I am not aware of anything ready made here.

I suggest to include libuarte to handle the serial transfer on the nRF52840, you would need to define a set of commands you may wish to configure the ANT channels from the nRF9160, and then the nRF52840 would simply forward the ANT data to the serial interface every message period.

Kenneth

[Brett]

Thanks Kenneth - I will give this a try.