Nordic Semiconductor is a semiconductor company that specializes in low power wireless systems-of-chip (SoC) with general connectivity over 2.4 GHz ISM band. Their focus is to provide low power consumption circuits for consumer electronics. The company provides solutions like sports equipment, Bluetooth SoC, wireless medical equipment and wireless audio applications.
Nordic Semiconductor nRF51 DK is a single board development platform to develop Bluetooth Low Energy applications. It also works for 2.4 GHz applications using nRF51 Series SoC (also provided by Nordic). It is based on 16 MHz ARM Cortex-M0 CPU and very useful for prototyping and building Bluetooth Low Energy applications. The Kit is easily connected with Master Emulator Firmware and the Master Control Panel Software to sniff BLE packets and the communicate with other Bluetooth Low Energy devices. The kit consists of GPIO pins with four programmable buttons and four LEDs. The nRF51 DK comes with 256 KB flash, 32 KB RAM and a built-in power supply. It also comes with a micro-USB port to connect the DK with the computer.
The Nordic board can be found here:
The development kit is highly capable of taking advantage of Bluetooth Low Energy flexibility. It can perform Over-The-Air Device Firmware Updates (OTA - DFU). That means that the we can update the firmware on the kit just by using our BLE enabled cellular phones. It is also capable of running any BLE application like beacons, smart watches, fitness tracker, smart home and RC toys.
Nordic's nRF51 development kit comes with full software support. Nordic Semiconductors introduces their protocol stack by calling it SoftDevices. These SoftDevices act as a middleman between Nordic’s application layer and physical layer. SoftDevice contains the implementation of GATT, GAP, L2Cap and security mechanisms. (You can refer the previous chapter for an introduction of these terms).
This protocol stack can be downloaded from Nordic's website and can easily be implemented on nRF51 system-on-chips. There are many SoftDevices available in the Nordic's website and can be implemented on SoC in line with requirements:
- S110: Bluetooth Smart Peripheral Stack
- S120: Bluetooth Smart 8-link Central Stack
- S130: Bluetooth Smart Concurrent central/peripheral/broadcaster/observer Stack
- S210: ANT/ANT+8 link Stack
- S310: Bluetooth Smart Peripheral/ANT 8-link Stack
The Nordic logos for these SoftDevices are:
