ibeacon as observer

[Nils Minor]

Hi,

is it possible to use the nrf ibeacon which is designed for advertising his data, as i think , to use it also as an observer which can receive data from other beacons?

the beacon sends in an interval data which is 31 bytes, is this correct?

is it possible, not really to connect like bonding two BLE devices, but to connect two beacons, so that they can communicate with small data through the advertising channels ?

best regards, Nils

[Stefan Birnir Sverrisson]

Hi Nils

The Beacon kit is preprogrammed with the S110 softdevice (Nordic's protocol stack), S110 application bootloader and the ibeacon application. S110 application bootloader means that you can reprogram the chip with any application that is made for Nordic's S110 stack, via your Android or IOS smartphone/tablet. This includes all the BLE applications located in the \nrf51822\Board\nrf6310\s110\ folder and the \nrf51822\Board\pca10001\s110\ folder in the SDK. However, these examples are made for the evaluation kit (pca10001) and the development kit (nrf6310). Tayloring those example for the beacon kit is only a matter of remapping the buttons and leds on the board. In addition, beacon kit also has an RGB led to express different activity, instead of multiple leds like the evaluation kit and development kit.

You can use the Beacon kit itself as an observer but then it needs to be in the central role. For this purpose, you need to connect a programmer to the beacon board and program the beacon kit with S120 softdevice, as well as any S120 application that scans for incoming advertising packets. Since the beacon kit does not come with a programmer, you would need to buy one, unless you have a programmer that ships with the development kit (the J-Link LITE CortexM-9), or any other compatible programmer. To connect a programmer to the beacon kit you need to manually hook up the connection points on the P2 panel on the Beacon kit with your programmer.

So perhaps it is a longshot to set up the beacon kit as an observer as this is not the intended purpose of the beacon kit. It would be easier to do this with either the development kit or the evaluation kit as those kits can easily be programmed without a bootloader, i.e. programmed with a programmer.

[Nils Minor]

Hi Stefan,

thanks for your answer. I understand what you told about iBeacon-Kit, for testing i have the nrf51822 development kit and also the Evaluation Kit :). I bought it nearly 1 year ago, did there are changes in chip, should i buy new one?

I have some more questions about advertising and observing with nrf51822, because i have a similar question i accept this as answer here is the link to the question.

devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../

thank you and best regards, Nils

[Stefan Birnir Sverrisson]

Hi Nils

The S120 central softdevice, which you need in order to scan for iBeacons, is only compatible with the second revision nRF51 hardware. If the chip markings on the nRF51 chips on your dev/ev kits say nRF51822 QFAA FA, nRF51822 QFAA GC or nRF51822 QFAA G0, then you are good to go to use the S120 softdevice, otherwise you need to purchase a new kit. The programmer that comes with the old dev kit is however still valid.