Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy

Chapter 5. Hardware Platforms

Most commercial use cases for BLE-enabled products involve peripherals, rather than the central devices (phones, tablets, or personal computers) you would design products to interact with. As such, this chapter introduces some specific development platforms for designing and prototyping BLE peripherals.

The discussion in this chapter assumes a basic familiarity with embedded system design (Chapter 10), and the primary goal is to point product designers to inexpensive and readily available platforms that might be appropriate for their products.

nRF51822-EK (Nordic Semiconductors)

Nordic Semiconductors has been involved in low-power wireless solutions for years and, as a board member on the Bluetooth SIG, has helped define and shape the core BLE standard since its inception. Widely known in the wireless market for its popular, general-purpose radio-frequency (RF) silicon solutions, it was one of the first companies to get affordable BLE peripheral-mode silicon to market (the nRF8001). Its newest nRF51 family represents a complete redesign from many of their previous single-chip RF products, combining a radio with a modern 32-bit ARM microprocessor in a single chip.

Technical Specifications

Nordic’s nRF51 series is a highly integrated system-on-chip, combining a BLE-compatible radio and a modern ARM processor in a single low-cost package with the following characteristics:

• ARM Cortex-M0 core running at 16 MHz
• 128 or 256 KB flash memory (between 80 and 90 KB ...