nRF52832 BLE support in ARM Mbed?

[Chris Pearson]

I'm having some difficulties sorting out what support there is for the nRF52832 in ARM's Mbed. Specifically, whether Mbed v6+ uses the SoftDevice or not.

Some things that have come up in my searches:

• In `mbed-os/targets/targets.json`, the nRF52832 is flagged: `SOFTDEVICE_NONE`
• In the `BLE_PeriodicAdvertising` example, the compile time defines  `DBLE_FEATURE_EXTENDED_ADVERTISING=1` and `-DBLE_FEATURE_PERIODIC_ADVERTISING=1` are set for the nRF52832, although it is my understanding there is no soft device support for periodic advertisement. (If I'm mistaken, please let me know!)
  • This example fails to work, although with no error.
• The Mbed page for the nRF52_DK does not list support above Mbed v5.15, although the support files are clearly there in the v6.11 release.

So, my questions are:

• Is there still support for the nRF52832 in Mbed?
• Is Mbed still using the soft device?

Thanks!

[awneil]

Chris Pearson said:

I'm having some difficulties sorting out what support there is for the nRF52832 in ARM's Mbed

You'd have to ask them about that - it's not a Nordic thing:

https://forums.mbed.com/

IIRC, they don't use the SoftDevice.

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Hi,

Nordic does not provide any support for mbed, and is not part of the development team that maintains support for Nordic targets in mbed OS.

Check out the release notes for mbed OS 6.0.0:

BLE changes

#12674, #12676, #12742, #12730

We have removed all deprecated APIs in BLE and adjusted other APIs to resolve dependencies on the deprecated ones. We have also removed target-specific stacks that are incompatible with the latest APIs.

Item	Change	Migration
SoftDevice stack	Superseded/Removed	* For nRF52* targets, please use the Cordio stack, which is already enabled by default. * nRF51* targets will be unsupported in future Mbed OS releases.

Best regards,
Jørgen

[Chris Pearson]

Thanks, Jørgen Holmefjord. In hindsight, looking for the release notes for the first version of v6 would have made sense. I do appreciate the clarification (with thanks to awneil, too!) as I wasn't certain if Nordic was involve there or not.

In some ways it's unfortunate that Nordic isn't part of the Mbed project. It's a really nice, concise way to write code for the Nordic chips. From looking at the examples for BLE, the equivalent code for Zephyr is so much longer and requires so many more calls than that for Mbed. (Whether hiding away the details is a good thing or not is something that remains to be seen, though.) Some of that may come down to personal preferences for C vs C++, though.

[awneil]

Chris Pearson said:

the equivalent code for Zephyr is so much longer and requires so many more calls than that for Mbed

I have yet to venture into the land of Zephyr ...

Chris Pearson said:

personal preferences for C vs C++

 the "traditional", C-based  nRF5 SDK is still available ...