It’s that time again
The Nordic Global Tech Tour is about to hit the road again. This time it is all about the goodies inside our nRF52 Series for Bluetooth Smart and what they enable you to do. The Nordic Global Tech Tour (GTT) is always an exciting and fun time for us here at Nordic. It is the marker that years of hard work on a new IC family and supporting software are complete, and we’re ready to take it on the road to spread the good news. It is eagerly anticipated by the staff engineers from R&D that we take with us as it is a unique opportunity for them to directly engage with developers using or considering using our devices.
Developers love it
We first embarked on our GTTs with the launch of the nRF51 series some 3 years ago. It was a bold step sending so many of our highly valuable and hard-working R&D engineers on the road to deliver a masterclass in the nRF51 and its benefits to you, our developers. It’s a lot of cost it’s a lot of logistics and a lot of planning. But it’s also a lot of fun
But my, it was well worth it, every location was over booked and we received an incredible response from attendees saying this sort of high-value technical, marketing free training was exactly what you wanted.
We continued to do local Tech Tours subsequent to the first GTT and expanded the topics each time to cover different demands.
Getting you up and running on the nRF52
The GTT this time around is of course about our new nRF52 Series Bluetooth Smart SoC and getting you familiar with its features so that you are well placed to get up and running and doing great things with it as soon as possible.
The nRF52 Series, simply put, is the most powerful, capable Bluetooth Smart SoC out there. It has a Cortex-M4F at its heart taking Bluetooth Smart application possibilities to a completely new level. But we have gone to great lengths to make the nRF52 and its internal features as easy to use as possible and also to make them perfectly suited to the goals of ultra-low power operation. Our design engineers will explain the philosophy of using the nRF52 for maximum performance as needed and also how to consume the minimum possible power.
Some important features will get special attention such as the advanced automatic power control schemes and taking advantage of them. The nRF52 peripherals have their own dedicated on-chip regulators and clock sources. This allows only exactly the peripherals required to be energized as needed with all non-required peripherals and CPU disabled. You will learn how to set up a communication interface (I²C module) to read data from an external source and store it into SRAM at periodic intervals without the need of CPU intervention. This specific example will be shown to relate to all peripherals on the device as they follow the same common design philosophy. After this example you will then see it used in conjunction with the Programmable Peripheral Interconnect (PPI) and EasyDMA to link up peripherals together and to memory thus creating ultra-low power operation and task completion without the CPU being involved.
Bringing NFC to Bluetooth pairing
There are some very special features that make the nRF52 stand out from the Bluetooth Smart crowd. One special case is the on-chip support for NFC-tag. We will show you how this feature, we believe, is going to be the de-facto standard way to pair Bluetooth Smart in IoT. It just makes the whole process simpler and safer. Our engineers will run through this feature and demonstrate its simplicity in operation and how easy it is to add NFC touch to pair to your design.
Software support and real applications
At Nordic we know it isn’t just about great ICs we recognize the value of good reliable, supporting software, and lots of it to help you achieve your aims. The nRF52 SDK will be covered and used extensively in support of demonstrating the nRF52’s great hardware features. The SDK covers everything from low-level peripheral drivers all the way up to full-blown Bluetooth Smart applications. SoftDevices are a Nordic concept, fully encapsulated protocol stacks with associated APIs that run in their own reserved memory space thus ensuring complete logical and physical separation from application code. During a walkthrough of a Bluetooth Smart application we show you how to configure and use a SoftDevice, specifically the S132 SoftDevice. The S132 is a perfect choice for this as it supports concurrency for all 4 Bluetooth Smart roles: Central, Peripheral, Broadcaster and Observer. Once you become familiar with the S132 in this session you’ll find it an easy switch over to the other SoftDevices for ANT and ANT/Bluetooth Smart combination SoftDevices.
Have your say
In addition to getting a day crammed full of great information, examples and tips. You get a unique opportunity to talk to our R&D people give them your thoughts and ask them questions. We’re always willing to listen and always value what you guys tell us. Who knows? Maybe your input could influence a new chip design? Wouldn’t that be cool?
The Nordic Global Tech Tour kicks off in Boston, US on October 5th 2015 and runs through 30 separate locations until December 10th in Osaka. It is free to attend and we’ll even feed you and supply you with beverages! All you need to do is register at the link below.
We can’t wait to see you there!
