BLE over UART (on PC serial COM port)

[Guillaume LS]

Hi,

This is obviously not the first question about this, but I still haven't found the answer I need here...

I would like to make a kind of serial to BLE gateway on my PC. I mean I would like to have a virtual COM port that would be able to send and receive frames over BLE.

The BLE device can be an nRF51/52 DK or nRF51 dongle. On the other side I have a custom board with a custom SW based on the ble_app_uart sample code.

I have read and tested many things about using ble_app_uart_c, pc-ble-driver-py, MCP, etc, etc but none of them really fits my needs. The closest approach I see for now would be using ble_app_uart_c on the DK or dongle, but it has limitations (max 20 bytes can be sent at once, or frame must be terminated by \n, etc).

What do you think I should do? Which solution would be the more straighforward? I consider modifying ble_app_uart_c to fit my needs but as this is just for testing purpose, I don't want to spend too much time. So I am looking for a possibly existing solution...

Thanks for reading

[Wojtek]

Why max 20 bytes at once is not acceptable for you? in "NORMAL" UART, you send 1 byte at once.

[Guillaume LS]

With 1 byte at once, BLE throughput will be slow but yes it can work. Maybe I will edit the ble_app_uart_c to do this way.