Can BLE beacons act as receivers?

[mkaze]

I am working on a project which involves sending data from many beacons to many other beacons. To be more specific, I have two groups of beacons:

The first group consists of senders (or advertisers) which regularly (i.e. 500ms interval) only send (or advertise) their IDs, for example UUIDs, using a protocol like iBeacon. These beacons may be attached to moving objects.

The second group of beacons consists of receivers that receive the broadcasted IDs sent by sender beacons which are in their proximity (and then send this data over wifi to a central system; but this is another topic and not my concern now). These beacons are stationary and may be mounted on walls.

I know the first group (sender beacons) can do their job properly. The second group (receiver beacons) is my concern. I am not sure whether the beacons based on Nordic NRF51xxx or NRF52xxx chips can also act as receivers? If it is possible, any pointers or links to documentation/tutorials on how this can be done would be really appreciated.

P.S. (If it is possible,) I was wondering whether beacons based on other chips like BLE chips produced by TI (e.g. CC2540) can also act as receivers?

P.P.S. Is it possible to connect wifi modules to beacons based on Nordic NRF51xxx or NRF52xxx chips?

[endnode]

Basically any BLE SoC like nRF5x series (or competition like TI CC2xxx) can do both transmit and receive. It's because to do any basic BLE link functionality the chip anyway needs to be able to do both Tx and Rx so the rest is just SW capability of BLE stack. So don't worry, all basic features for the solution you outline are met by nRF51 (although no one would really go with nRF51 for new project when you can take nRF52 for basically same BOM cost and have much powerful platform with more memory, RAM and in most cases also lower power consumption).

To your second question: yes indeed, you can combine nRF5x chips with any other solution which provides some standard wired interface such as I2C(TWI), SPI or UART. Just note that all the routing and logic inside such complex will need to be written in the FWs of BLE and WiFi chips (by you;).

[mkaze]

@endnode Thank you very much. This is very important to me, so just to make sure: you mean they can receive broadcasted data by other beacons (i.e. act as a beacon scanner like the android beacon scanner apps) without any physical connection or pairing, right? And would you kindly tell me which part of the documentation/tutorial I should take a look at? Thanks again.

[endnode]

Yes, they can act as general passive/active scanner so your application running on top of BLE stack will receive callback event whenever any broadcasted packet is captured.

Now based on the level of your questions (sorry, no offence) I would recommend to start from the very beginning: read tutorials, read Getting started page on Infocenter, scanning is part of basically every example (except simple beacon) inside nRF5 SDK.

[mkaze]

No, you are absolutely right! I am a newbie with the BLE! Thanks a lot for the links!