nRF52 USB Dongle as programmer and beacon receiver

[Kaveh.M]

I had a generic USB dongle that I used to receive beacons on my machine from an nRF52832 chip. 

To be able to perform OTA DFU, I replaced that generic USB dongle with an nRF52840 USB dongle. 

Can I use the nRF52840 to function both as a programmer and a receiver of the beacons after programming? How could this be made possible, 

Thanks

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Hi,

Yes, the nRF52840 Dongle can be used to receive beacons. You can use nRF Connect BLE application if you do not need to log the packets/parse it in any specific way, or you can create a C/Python/Node.JS application using pc-ble-driver.

Note that all these options requires the dongle to be flashed with a specific firmware for the task it will perform. It is therefore not possible to perform OTA DFU while receiving beacons (unless you create your own custom firmware for the Dongle).

Best regards,
Jørgen

[Kaveh.M]

It seems like I have to combine C code that receives beacons, and the C code that performs programming and put some conditions to perform either former or latter. Are there examples in SDK for either of these to use as source and flash nRF52840 dongle with?

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Actually, nrfutil command line tool, which is used for performing OTA DFU is based on pc-ble-driver-py. This means that if is possible to extend the nrfutil Python application with custom code to scan for beacons alongside with performing DFU.

pc-nrfutil is open source and available on our GitHub. The BLE DFU transport can be found here.

If you do not require OTA DFU and beacon scanning at the same time, you can just use two separate pc-ble-driver-py applications. The firmware running on the dongle (connectivity FW) will be the same, given that you use the same pc-ble-driver-py version as is used in pc-nrfutil.

[Kaveh.M]

Ok thanks. How about the nRF Connect mobile App. Is that open source? Can we find out the process it follows to perform OTA updates?

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Unfortunately, nRF Connect for Mobile is not available as open source, however, you can find the source of nRF Toolbox on our GitHub. This also includes support for DFU.

If you have other questions related to mobile applications, please post it in a new ticket, as this is off topic for this thread.