I built quite many prototypes on this blog with RFDuino
based on Nordic Semiconductor's nRF51822 and I can still recommend
that small development board to people who want to get initiated
quickly and painlessly into the world of Bluetooth Low Energy
programming. The limitations of RFDuino became apparent quite soon
and it was time to get deeper. On the other hand, I wanted to stay
with the excellent nRF51822 so I looked for a breakout board - as
simple as possible.
This is how I stumbled into Florian Echtler's page about low-cost BLE development environment based on the nRF51822 and the Bus Pirate programming tool. So I quickly ordered a no-name variant of Waveshare's Core51822 breakout board, a Bus Pirate tool and a bunch of DHT-22 sensors (because I wanted to measure something in the environment). Also note that the breakout board has a connector with 2 mm pin spacing which is not the usual 0.1 inch pitch. It helps if you have a prototyping board with both 2 mm and 0.1 inch pitch like this one which cannot be found in every store.
Generally speaking, following the instructions on Florian's page was easy enough. I ran into two issues. First, I had no success with the SWD programming software he refers to but Florian's fork (which is based on an earlier version of the programming software) worked well for me. Second, I experienced instability if the GND pins of the breakout are not connected (there are 2 of them).
First about the hardware. The schematic below show only the parts that are connected to the pins of the breakout board, the schematic of the breakout board itself is not included.
Highlights:
Click here (adv_dht22.zip (nRF51822), bledht22.zip (Android)) to download the example programs related to this blog post.
Let's start with the code that goes into the nRF51822 which can be found in adv_dht22.zip. The assumption is that you completed Florian's instructions, including the upload of the S110 soft device. Then unzip adv_dht22.zip and do the following modifications:
The code looks quite frightening compared to the super-simple RFDuino equivalent but most of it is just template. My highlights:
Regarding the Android code: this is just the app/src part of the source tree of an Android Studio project. I adopted this rather primitive export method as this super-advanced IDE still does not have code export option that its obsolete predecessor, the Eclipse IDE used to have. Check out onLeScan method in MainActivity.java to see, how the BLE GAP parser introduced in this blog post is used to take apart the advertisement message and filter BLE nodes that advertise DHT-22 measurements.
The outcome looks like this:
Note that each sensor is identified by a 64-bit unique ID (a service of the nRF51822). Now this data just needs to be uploaded into some sort of service and then the big data analysis can start ;-). More about that later.
This is how I stumbled into Florian Echtler's page about low-cost BLE development environment based on the nRF51822 and the Bus Pirate programming tool. So I quickly ordered a no-name variant of Waveshare's Core51822 breakout board, a Bus Pirate tool and a bunch of DHT-22 sensors (because I wanted to measure something in the environment). Also note that the breakout board has a connector with 2 mm pin spacing which is not the usual 0.1 inch pitch. It helps if you have a prototyping board with both 2 mm and 0.1 inch pitch like this one which cannot be found in every store.
Generally speaking, following the instructions on Florian's page was easy enough. I ran into two issues. First, I had no success with the SWD programming software he refers to but Florian's fork (which is based on an earlier version of the programming software) worked well for me. Second, I experienced instability if the GND pins of the breakout are not connected (there are 2 of them).
First about the hardware. The schematic below show only the parts that are connected to the pins of the breakout board, the schematic of the breakout board itself is not included.
Highlights:
- DHT-22 is connected to P0.17 which is both input and output depending on the communication phase.
- P0.21 LED provides a feedback about the BLE activities. This is a convention coming from the PCA10028 dev board that we lied to the Nordic tool chain that we have. You can omit this LED if you want to save some energy.
- SV1 header is a TTL serial port where the example program emits
some debug messages. You can omit this header if you are extremely
confident. I use a level converter like this to connect this port to a standard RS232C port. The UART operates on P0.18 (RxD) and P0.20 (TxD).
- SV2 header goes to the Bus Pirate. Check out Florian's document
about the connection. Make sure that this cable is as short as possible.
Click here (adv_dht22.zip (nRF51822), bledht22.zip (Android)) to download the example programs related to this blog post.
Let's start with the code that goes into the nRF51822 which can be found in adv_dht22.zip. The assumption is that you completed Florian's instructions, including the upload of the S110 soft device. Then unzip adv_dht22.zip and do the following modifications:
- Edit Makefile and make sure that the RF51_SDK_PATH variable points to the location where you installed the Nordic SDK.
- Edit upload.sh and make sure that the paths point to the location where you installed Florian's version of the SWD programmer. Also, make sure that the USB device is correct (/dev/ttyUSB0 by default).
The code looks quite frightening compared to the super-simple RFDuino equivalent but most of it is just template. My highlights:
- Check out in advertising_init(), how the advertisement packet is set up. We transfer the measurements in a service data GAP field and I took the liberty to allocate a 16-bit UUID for it (quite far from the standard service UUIDs).
- Check out timers_init(), timers_start() and sampler_timer_handler() methods how the periodic reading of the sensor and the update of the advertisement packet is accomplished.
- DHT-22 sensor handling is done in dht22.c. This sensor has a somewhat peculiar 1-wire interface. Read this document and the code will be easy to understand.
Regarding the Android code: this is just the app/src part of the source tree of an Android Studio project. I adopted this rather primitive export method as this super-advanced IDE still does not have code export option that its obsolete predecessor, the Eclipse IDE used to have. Check out onLeScan method in MainActivity.java to see, how the BLE GAP parser introduced in this blog post is used to take apart the advertisement message and filter BLE nodes that advertise DHT-22 measurements.
The outcome looks like this:
Note that each sensor is identified by a 64-bit unique ID (a service of the nRF51822). Now this data just needs to be uploaded into some sort of service and then the big data analysis can start ;-). More about that later.
11 comments:
How about powering the device with batteries? Have you experimented with that? Would be nice to have the device running for months or years without direct connection to a power source. Any recommendations on the required parts?
Anonymous, there's a continuation post. If you scroll down to the end of that post, there's a picture, how the device looks like now. It runs on 3 AA batteries which is about 3600 mAh. The operating voltage range of this circuit is determined by the DHT-22 (about 3.1V minimum) and the nRF51822 (3.6V max). Hence I inserted a 1 Ohm serial resistor and a 3.6V Zener diode between the battery pack and the circuit as the nominally 3x1.2V batteries tend to have higher voltage initially that exceeds the nRF51822 max. 3.6V voltage.
With regards to power consumption: according to my measurements this circuit draws about 4-5 mA on average. With the 3600 mAh battery pack (which are quite ordinary batteries), that means about 30 days, 1 month. If that is not enough for you, look for specialist batteries like this one. This is a 17Ah battery, with this battery the device would remain operational for about 140 days. If that's still not enough, you can go higher, e.g. a typical car battery is 55 Ah but that's quite heavy.
One thing about batteries: normal, household batteries don't tolerate outside temperatures, look for that too.
Hi. I didn't compile your project. I get an errror from keil. The error is about
static ble_uuid_t m_adv_uuids[] = {}; . Keil said to me an empty initializer is invalid for an array with unspecified bound. how i can solve this problem ? Can you send the working full project to my mail ?
Hakan, this is the working full project in the ZIP file. It was compiled with gcc, you should look at the Makefile that also comes with the project, how to compile it. I never used the Keil compiler and I don't know, what sort of problem it has.
I did not try but what about removing this line (line 90):
static ble_uuid_t m_adv_uuids[] = {};
Change this line (line 257):
advdata.uuids_complete.uuid_cnt = sizeof(m_adv_uuids) / sizeof(m_adv_uuids[0]);
to this:
advdata.uuids_complete.uuid_cnt = 0;
and removing line 258 entirely?
Essentially we are constructing here an advertisement packet that does not have any advertised services but does have a service data structure (with the measurement data in it).
Tenk you very much Gabor Paller. Your solution is working now. :)
Hello Gabor,
Thanks for your tutorial,it's very informartive.
I although have a problem when i try to compile your work on windows.
I installed the ARM Toolchain and GnuWin in order to use the make command. The compiling of the files work until the point where it has to link files. And that's where he tells me the errors:
In function warump_timer_handler:
"Undefined Reference to ble_advertising_start"
In function sampler_timer_handler:
"Undefined Reference to ble_advertising_start"
"Undefined Reference to ble_advertising_start"
I modified your makefile to make it work with my sdk installation Path but i didn't make any drastic change.
Would you have any idea about a way to solve this error?
Thanks
Yamine, did you install the Nordic SDK? Which version?
Yes, i have installed the SDK n°11, it probably is where the problems come from,because SDK 11 doesn't feature anything for the S110 device?
Yamine, I have experience with version 10 (on which this project is based) and version 12 (on which this project is based. My experience is that porting between these two SDK versions were quite painful. My advise would be to move to the project with version 12 (link is above). That project uses a different temperature/humidity/pressure sensor but maybe it is easier to backport the DHT-22 logic from this project than to convert this project into SDK 11/12.
Alternatively, you can try to download SDK 10. They are all on the website, older versions just don't have links pointing to them.
Thank you very much for your help.
I managed to solve the problem by as you said downloading the SDK 10. The project still didn't compile then. I had to modify the makefile and put the project in a specific folder, i think it's in BLE peripheral examples one and modify the paths to the files you include.
Thanks again for your very helpful tutorial!
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