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is it possible to connect nrf52 thingy to another nrf52 soc peer to peer?

can i connect iot sensor node nrf52 thingy to another nrf52 soc via ble or IEEE 802.15.4 and access it on cloud

  • In general yes. I assume your next question will be "How?" and the answer is "so many ways that you will need to give some context and requirements to find some narrowed down list".

  • Hi,

    You asked just in time. Recently we released Thread/Bluetooth Low Energy dynamic multiprotocol solution that allows for concurrent operation of Thread and Bluetooth Low Energy. As a part of our demo we connected nRF52 Thingy to a cloud through Thread/Bluetooth Low Energy multiprotocol router. See video in this blog post for details. So definitely, it is possible :).

    Due to nature of Thread/Bluetooth Low Energy dynamic multiprotocol solution, using the Bluetooth Low Energy Central role is ineffective and thus not recommended. As a result in our demo Thread/Bluetooth Low Energy multiprotocol router is in Bluetooth Low Energy Peripheral role, and nRF52 Thingy is in Bluetooth Low Energy Central role. So far an official firmware for nRF52 Thingy supports only Bluetooth Low Energy Peripheral role (as Thingy is mainly intended to work with smartphones which are usually Centrals), so we made some changes in nRF52 Thingy firmware, just for the purpose of the demo, to make it work as described. But this modified firmware was not published yet.

  • Hi Krzysztof Loska ,

    We are trying to place thingy52 in an existing thread coap client/server setup. In the existing setup we have 2 coap clients and 1 coap server. we would like to add thingy 52 to this existing setup and transmit the thingy52 sensor data to the cloud using MQTT.

    But how do we add thingy52 into the setup.

    The coap clients are running simple_coap_client code, and coap server is running simple_coap_server code.

  • Hello,

    As Krzysztof well described above, we made a demo where we connected nRF52 Thingy to the internet via Thread network. Unfortunately, we don't have specific date on which we will release this example.

    When it comes to technical side, we modified nRF52 Thingy to act as Bluetooth Central rather than Bluetooth Peripheral. The device automatically scanned for devices that advertise Nordic UART Service UUID (NUS), and connected to them.

    On the Bluetooth Peripheral side, we have used Dynamic Multiprotocol CoAP Client + NUS example from nRF5 SDK for Thread. We have modified the NUS RX handler to accept all sort of different commands. Whenever nRF5 Thingy wanted to report e.g. change of the temperature, it sent data over NUS in some predefined format. Then the BLE/Thread device translated it to the CoAP Message and sent it to the cloud, using Thread Network (so it acts as a gateway/translator).

    The same approach can be taken in your application. Unfortunately, there is no support for MQTT at the moment in the SDK. However we plan to add support for MQTT-SN protocol in the next release of nRF5 SDK for Thread.

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