Connecting nRF51 with Windows 10 Bluetooth

[clifton]

We have a custom hardware device that uses the nRF51 and the S130 softdevices. We are able to connect our device to our app on iOS and Android and through a web-bluetooth application on Chrome OS and Mac.

We are not able to connect the nRF51 to Windows 10 through the Bluetooth System Settings. We can see the device advertising from the "Add a device" Windows tool. When we click to connect to our device we get the generic error message "Try connecting to your device again."

Is there a connection interval or other setting specific to Windows 10 that is different than all other platforms? We do not have any problems with iOS, Android, Chrome, and Mac on establishing connection, just Windows.

As a test, I used the nRF51 DK PCA10028 and the example BLE Power Profiling app to try to establish a Windows connection. I can connect to the nRF51 DK on my Mac and Android phone and discover services. When I try to connect on Windows 10 through the Bluetooth System Settings, I get the same "Try connecting to your device again" error message.

I then tried the "Experimental: BLE Blinky Application" and "Blood Pressure Application" example apps on the nRF51 DK and I was able to connect on Windows 10. What's the underlying difference?

Thanks for your help.

[Bjørn Kvaale]

Hi clifton, one of these two links might be helpful (link 1, link 2). In general, whenever you want to communicate between a windows pc & an nrf5x dk using BLE, you are best off by connecting it via an nrf51 dongle or an nrf5x DK. Tools like nrf connect will require an nrf51 dongle or nrf5x dk to be able to establish BLE connections to another nrf5x DK for example.

I also tried connecting to my Windows 10 PC via PC Settings with the BLE Blinky example running on my nrf52dk. In that example, a BLE connection was established. It might be that your PC does not recognize a Bluetooth service that the nrf51 DK application is using.

[clifton]

Bjorn- thanks for the help. I had seen those other link threads but I was not able to get any help from them. I understand a dongle is a nice to have, but we are developing a consumer product and we cannot include a dongle.

Did you try the "Power Profiling" example and were you able to establish a BLE connection? What is different between the "Power Profiling" program and the other example programs that would prevent connection? Have you seen instances where a product/program will work with all other OSs (Android, iOS, Chrome, Mac) but cannot establish connection with Win 10? Thanks.

[Bjørn Kvaale]

Hi Clifton, I was not able to establish a BLE connection with the Power Profiling example. It is difficult to say what the issue is, as the error received on Windows is not very useful unfortunately. Might work to try to use the Bluetooth LE Explorer app for Windows to get more debug information. Looking at the infocenter for the power profiling example, in the testing phase you can see that you have to change the connection interval in master control panel (now called nrf connect) in order to connect to this example. The ble_peripheral experimental blinky example instead specifies a MIN_CONN_INTERVAL & MAX_CONN_INTERVAL. The central decides which connection interval to use. The same goes for the ble_app_hids_keyboard example located in the ble_peripheral folder. I would take a close look at this example, as it specifies to connect directly to the Windows Bluetooth driver. Whereas the other examples tell the computer, any value between MIN & MAX connection intervals are fine, the Power Profiling example says only one value will work. Could be that the Windows Bluetooth driver is not satisfied with this.