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RedBear BLE Nano 2

I am admittedly a little lost here:

I am trying to utilize a RedBear BLE Nano 2 (nrf52832) to collect serial data from a sensor and send it to a raspberry pi every 15 minutes, using as little power as possible.

There are so many options when it comes to different softdevices, SDKs, IDEs, network topologies, protocols. I was hoping someone might point me in the right direction to most simply achieve my goal.

  • Sorry but what is the architecture exactly? Board with nRF52 will be receiving data over the air from sensors and feed RPI over serial interface or it will only collect data from sensors (over wires) and transport to RPI over the air? Is latter then how you enable RPI with BLE radio?

    Anyway as soon as you clean up these things you will arrive to something like this:

    • Use the latest nRF5 SDK (v14.0.0 as of today) and S132 SoftDevice (= Nordic BLE stack, V5.0.0 as of today).
    • If you want to use connection link based solution (reliable transport but probably little bit more power hungry on nRF52 side) then look at Nordic BLE UART Service examples (nRF5_SDK_14.0.0_3bcc1f7\examples\ble_peripheral\ble_app_uart and nRF5_SDK_14.0.0_3bcc1f7\examples\ble_central\ble_app_uart_c).
    • If you are fine to have not 100% reliable link but the lowest power consumption possible (only on sensor side, on RPI side it will go up by several levels compared to previous architecture) then go with simple broadcaster (beacon) and observer (scanner) examples (e.g. nRF5_SDK_14.0.0_3bcc1f7\examples\ble_peripheral\ble_app_beacon and any BLE Central project).
  • Thanks so much for the quick reply endnode! That get's me pointed in a good direction.

    The nRF52 will be wired to a sensor and will send the collected data over the air to RPI. RPI3 Model B has BLE built in.

    I would be fine with a less than 100% reliable link, as the more important piece will be low power consumption, so I will take your advice to go with the simple boradcaster/observer design.

    It looks like there is a good existing tutorial regarding BLE central: devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../ ..however this tutorial would seem to explain the Nordic BLE UART Service rather than the simple boradcaster/observer design.

    Are there any additional existing tutorials that might be helpful?

    Thanks again!

  • Observer is very easy thing, basically just BLE stack (SD) set-up/init and enable during boot, start scanning and receive single event type for the rest of FW life-time in event handler. That's it, you really can make such FW even when starting from scratch;)

  • Also if your observer will be RPI3 with built-in BLE stack and API then any Nordic example of that part is pretty much useless, right? That's why I asked what device will be the second peer... you should then go to their forum and try to get some help there.

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