Hi All,
I'm a little rusty on my embedded C and was wondering if I could get a few broad pointers on the best way to organize this research system I'm putting together.
The system is basic: I have an NRF52840 that talks to a custom IC via SPI and then sends whatever it reads out to an NRF52 dongle via bluetooth. If this was one way then it would be especially straight forward but unfortunately, the NRF52840 can also receive commands from the dongle (over bluetooth) that may or may not trigger specific SPI transactions. It seems to me that the best way to organize the NRF52840 (that's talking to the custom IC) as the peripheral and the dongle as the central device. This way the peripheral can use an interrupt to query the IC and then notify the central device with a new packet.
I'm having a little more trouble with the other main function though (dongle sending commands to the peripheral) though since it's really important that this bluetooth connection runs as fast as possible without dropping any packets.
Is it fair to have a main while loop on all my devices that spins (just checking if there's been an incoming command) when they're in their main interrupt-driven operating mode. Then if there has been a command, they break out of their interrupt-driven mode and work on whatever the command is? I worry that this constant spinning may burn unnecessary power and also may slow down the main BLE operation (which needs to run as fast as possible!). Are there other alternatives that may allow the bluetooth and spi to operate as fast as possible in parallel?
Thanks so much for any advice/help. If anything was unclear please let me know and I can clarify. I tried to distill everything to not be too confusing but I may have distilled too much.
- Ryan
