nRF6943 or nRF9160 DK (BLE Cellular gateway)

[Ben Li]

Hi, 

I'm trying to build a proof of concept for a BLE gateway that captures data from BLE sensors and sends it to the cloud via LTE-M connection. I'm hoping that the gateway can support 20 concurrent BLE connections. However, I'm stuck in the choice between picking nRF6943 (thingy 91) or nRF9160 DK for testing my proof of concept. Or is there any other board that can also serves as a BLE gateway that can connect up to 20 concurrent BLE connections. My next question will be, are that any other device or sensors that can advertise BLE signals for me to test the gateway? I was thinking about using nRF9160 as the gateway and thingy 91 as a peripheral that advertise signals to nRF9160DK since it has sensors on it. Is there a better solution?

Thank you

[Ben Li]

Hi Simon,

So the idea is to use a nRF52 DK board as a central that scans and initiate connections, and I will need another nrf52 as a peripheral to advertise 20 BLE signals in total using blood pressure profile, heart rate profile... etc. To send the data to the cloud, I will connect the central with another third party cellular module via SPI or UART so that I can foward the data to the cloud via 4G/5G cellular. Does that work?

Best,

Ben Li

[Simonr]

Hi Ben

Yes, that should work, but I don't see why you would have 20 (I assume different) BLE advertisements from one device, unless it's just as proof of concept. I guess multiple different nRF52 peripherals would be the real use case here.

Best regards,

Simon

[Ben Li]

Hi Simon,

Thank you so much for your input here! 

Yes, I'm just trying to build a proof of concept here, I think I will use multiple nRF52 peripherals here to get 20 concurrent BLE connections.

My main components for the BLE to Cellular gateway will be nRF52840dk and sim7600dk

From my research, there are plenty of people that uses ESP32 or STM MCU to connect with nrf52 and sim7600 dk. Would having a ESP or STM be nessesary ? 

Also, assuming I'm just connecting nrf52 with sim7600 using UART. Can I use nrf connect SDK? And how can I display the data on iphone using nrf connect SDK?

Thank you in advance,

Ben Li

[Simonr]

Hi again Ben

Sorry about the late reply, but I've been on vacation for the last few weeks. If you connect the nRF52 gateway to the SIM7600 DK with UART or SPI you should not need the ESP or STM boards I think. To develop the nRF52 application you can indeed use the nRF Connect SDK for development purposes. I imagine you would advertise to and then connect to the iPhone and then share whatever data you want through a custom BLE service, which we have a sample on how to do here.

Best regards,

Simon