New comer in the Sigfox ecosystem : the Wisol FM20R1.
Wisol have already changed the Sigfox module world by providing a solution based on the OnSemi design for transmitting on Sigfox network for about 2$. Now they are back with a full SoC solution for a really competitive price estimated under 15$. This solution is providing SigFox, GPS, Wifi, NFC, RF and includes an accelerometer.
As seen in a previous post, working with nRF52 and Eclipse is not the easiest challenge !
This post will detail how to create a template project for a BLE project using a softdevice working on the PCA10040 board and using my ble library.
This can be apply to most of ble starting project with nRF52. I assume you configured Eclipse IDE as described in this post. As a pre-requisite you also need git. The tutorial works with SDK 12.3
nRF52382 is a BLE micro-controler based on a 32b Arm M4 core operating at 64MHz. It includes 512kb of flash memory and 64kb of RAM with a price about 2,80$.
It supports BLE (Bluetooth Smart) and ANT RF protocol. It also includes a NFC-A tag. NFC can wake up device and allow easy bluetooth pairing.
Device allows Over-the-Air Firmware Upgrade. It also have different SoftDevice (protocol stacks) with BLE or ANT8 or both.
By including internal Oscillators, power supply elements and Rf elements, this chip is a low cost solution for building IoT.
nRF52832 will be available Q1 2016 but development kit preview are available. (note – this post has been kept as a draft for a too long time !! )
Now, let’s read the next part for how to quick start with the development kit.
nrf51 ble stack
After building my first project using an nRF51 device from the template given in the SDK I was really disappointed by the result, I mean, it works but the code is really bad and hard to maintain.
The given examples are not really generic and if you have to create your custom ble service and characteristics you have to make many modification in a code that is not clean for all.
So my second project was to create a ble library to make creation of custom services & characteristics as easy as possible and to create a main file with less code.
Yesterday I made a conferences about Internet Of Things main technologies with live demonstration. Watch it on Youtube !
This year M2M and IoT are two of the most heard keywords in our technological domain. One of these is fresh new, I mean a couple of year old, when the other one is pretty much older. M2M, standing for Machine to Machine is a capability for two machines (or more) to discuss together and take actions. Like a temperature sensor allowing your boiler to decide when to start or stop. In the industry where automatism are in place since many year, M2M is something in place, running, not new. IoT, standing for Internet of Things is part of the M2M technology but actually raising. In IoT the main word is Internet and it stands for the capability of an object to talk over Internet on its own. Why only now ? mostly because now it starts to be possible.
RFduino connected to HC-05 bluetooth
I was looking for a system able to work with an iPhone (Bluetooth Low Emission – LBE) and a standard android (Standard bluetooth / rfcom). The RFDuino Arduino platform I have is perfect for BLE so, I decided to add a HC-05 module for the standard bluetooth.
Here is the description on how to make it !
The RfDuino arduino device i’m actually hacking is a bluetooth 4 (BLE) device. I was expecting to work with it as any bluetooth devices in a terminal session like with rfcomm in previous version of bluetooth.
In fact not ! BLE are not pairable as the classical BT device, they are discovered by the application itself. Then you have communication channel you can read or write to communicate.
Thanks to a post in a forum, I’ve found a really usefull tool lightblue allowing to connect any BLE device and send it data. This soft works on iOS and MacOsX.
You can also get Apple tool : Bluetooth explorer and Packet Logger here.