How to use the connectivity board as a BT device in Linux host system?

[Henry]

Hi Nordic support, I check the serialization page (infocenter.nordicsemi.com/.../lib_serialization.html) And prepare a connectivity board as below for my host system. Detail as below:

Board: PCA10028
SD: S130V2
FW: SDK11-ble_connectivity (prjs location: nRF5_SDK_11.0.0_89a8197\examples\ble_central_and_peripheral\ble_connectivity\pca10028\ser_s130_hci\arm5_no_packs )

And then I used a USB to UART cable just connect the Rx/Tx and GND as the serialization page mentioned, aka the application side is connect to a UART cable to PC. (infocenter.nordicsemi.com/.../nrf51_setups_serialization.html)

Back to my linux host system, I try to use the bluez utilities to control the connectivity board, but it fail. The command is like below:

$ sudo hciattach -r /dev/ttyUSB0 any 115200 noflow
Device setup complete
$ hciconfig 
hci0:	Type: BR/EDR  Bus: UART
	BD Address: 00:00:00:00:00:00  ACL MTU: 0:0  SCO MTU: 0:0
	DOWN 
	RX bytes:0 acl:0 sco:0 events:0 errors:0
	TX bytes:0 acl:0 sco:0 commands:0 errors:0

$ sudo hciconfig hci0 up
Can't init device hci0: Cannot assign requested address (99)

Here is our issue:

1. Our target is to take your solution to play as a BT PHY in our system, and the Linux BT stacks will use it as a BT host to scan/connect/pair with other BT devices.
2. Is the HCI_uart project really support the standard HCI command?
3. How to make this experiment work?

Thanks.

[Henry]

BTW, I found a Linux driver may related with our usage. Any doc to talk about it?

nRF51-BLE-Driver-Linux: www.nordicsemi.com/.../47013

Thanks.

[Stian Røed Hafskjold]

Using bluez to control the chip is not possible as far as I know.

The link in your comment (www.nordicsemi.com/.../47013) is the linux driver for the nRF51. You can try that out. There is a few examples in the driver bundle, but unfortunately it is not very well documented.

The newest version of the driver is available here, github.com/.../pc-ble-driver, with a newer version of the documentation.

Documentation for building:
github.com/.../README.md

Documentation for usage:
github.com/.../README.md

Firmware is included in the resources folder, and is merged with the softdevice.

[Carles]

To use BlueZ to interface with a Nordic nRF chip you would need firmware running on the chip that implemented the HCI interface. That is not something that Nordic provides right now, so what you are trying to accomplish is currently not possible with Nordic firmware.

[Henry]

Ok, thanks. Does your product line have such kind of connectivity IC in the future?

[Carles]

It's quite likely.