How to wire NRF51822 board (RX, TX)?

[4ntoine]

Hello. I'm having the following connection module with nRF51822 chip. It was purchased here.

I've found example sketch for Arduino but i can't understand how to wire the board?

I have experience with HM-10/HM-11 and HC-08 BLE modules and they have special pins for UART RX and TX to wire directly to Arduino's RX and TX.

Is there smth similar to this board? Can it work as wireless serial? For now my understanding is that i will need to use special lib (as in arduino example) and this is done in HM/HC firmware to work as transparent.

[Petter Myhre]

The GPIOs on nRF51 (and nRF52) are flexible. You can assign the UART connections to any pins.

Since you tagged ble_app_uart, I'm assuming you have found our SDK. In that example you can set which pins to use in uart_init().

[4ntoine]

I've found Arduino sketch, is it SDK or should i prepare some firmware for NRF chip?

Can it work in "transparent" mode without any SDK/lib used like HM? It means i will be able to wire TX pin to Arduino RX just like it's regular serial? My purpose is to interact with Arduino bootloader and it means i can't use any SDK or lib for this in order to use default boorloader. I can do it with HM.

[Petter Myhre]

The Arduino code you linked to seems to be made for nRF8001, this is shipped with firmware so that it easily can be used as a connectivity chip. The nRF51822 is shipped without firmware from us. I'm not sure what firmware the module maker has put on it, if any. It may be that you need to program it. We have a BLE serialization library in our SDK, see this. We also have an example called ble_connectivity.

[4ntoine]

thank you for clarification. so the question now is in currently burned firmware running in BLE chip. if it's not BLE_APP_UART i'm in trouble and since i can't discover service with UUID 0001 it seems i am ;) I would love to find nrf51822-based board with already uploaded BLE_APP_UART firmware.. Is it relatively simple way to compile/upload this firmware without having extra hardware (like motherboard or dev kit)?

[Petter Myhre]

You could use device firmware update over the air, but then you need DFU firmware on the chip. You need a programmer. Like this. Or you could use our nRF51 Development Kit that comes with an OB programmer. It can be used to program external chips.

[Roger Clark]

I have several of those modules and they did not come with any firmware on them at all.

If you want an nRF51 based BLE device with some sort of AT based command set, I think that www.wireless-tag.com has a product the WGT51822-S4AT www.aliexpress.com/.../32368441515.html

However it is possible to directly program the these chips using a modified version of the RedBearLabs nRF51822-Arduino repo on github.

see my repo www.github.com/rogerclarkmelbourne/nRF51822-arduino I did a demo video of the Arduino IDE programming that module

www.youtube.com/watch

I have written a blog entry on my config and hardware

www.rogerclark.net/.../