Test of the ZigBee light bulb with a ZigBee light switch by using two nRF52840 Dongles

[PPieta]

Hi,

I bought two of the NRF52840 Dongles to learn and develop smart home compliant applications running on ZigBee protocol. My goal is to create a Smart Home ZigBee hub which could control smart switches compliant with the technology.

My first idea for learning more on that matter was to run the two examples for the light control which are available in the SDK and them being the 'light bulb' and 'light switch'. However, the second one does not provide the .hex file for the Dongle to be flashed to the board through the nRF Connect for Desktop application.

I've been going over multiple different articles in the NordicSemi's support pages, however none of them explained an easy way of adapting the PCA10056 examples to the PCA10059. Ideally, I would like to work with the SEGGER software and just export the .hex files to then upload it to the Dongle through the nRF Connect using the board's DFU bootloader.

Any advice appreciated,

Pawel

[Marte Myrvold]

Hi Pawel,

Not all the examples in the nRF5 SDK for Thread and Zigbee are supported on the nRF52840 Dongle. You can see which examples are supported on which boards here.

One of the reasons the light bulb example is not supported is because four different buttons are used in the example, while the Dongle only has one user configurable button. Thus, the example is not compatible with the dongle without changing the code so that you only use one button. If you want to use the light switch on your dongle, you must figure out what you want your button to do, and then you must change the code accordingly, also removing the other buttons from the code. You should only use BSP_BOARD_BUTTON_0.

You can find how to adapt nRF5 SDK projects for the dongle in our nRF52840 Dongle Programming Tutorial.

We recommend using a DK and not the dongle when developing, as it offers more features than the dongle, and is better suited for development.

Best regards,

Marte