429 NRF52 Bluetooth (BLE) Tutorial. Does it consume less than the ESP32? (Feather, XIAO, ItsyBitsy)

I need your help. I want to prepare a wireless subwoofer and a speaker connection with one Bluetooth, please confirm if it's possible..

What model of power analyzer are you using?

Love the details in your videos, great work!

Hello Andreas, I love your channel. I am experimenting with the Xaio NRF52 right now, and I was wondering if you knew of any desktop software that can be used to log sensor data from the chip over BLE.

I LOVE YOU

What about the UDOO RYZEN V1000 Maker Board SBC which is ARDUINO compatible.

wich is the smallest one?

As always, exactly what I am looking for, even though I am always 9+ months late :)

You did skipped the good part , i wanted to know how u build a ecg monitoring Device . Instead u shown only temp sensors.


Sorry i m no engineer so i am unable to grasp fully too.

i think this should be better >>>> REYAX RYBG211_Lite

I built product using the nrf2401 and msp430 very low power, using straight gcc/gdb command line tools. And also got esp8266 working by downloading tons of glued together software before it had arduino support.
Arduino ide so much simpler to use even if limited functionality.
I was hoping the guy with the accent ;) would show how to update the bootloader in the nrf dongle so I can use it with the arduino ide like the feather. If you don't want to buy the $500 dongle, you can do it using openOCD..somehow, no simple tutorial on how.

If you want to get the true performance from nrf5x chips, the SDK is the way to go. I have never found it to be a problem in terms of development or debugging. I have found that RTOSes like mbed hide too much and force lowest common denominator functionality that cripples what you can do. For example, setting up for externally-triggered ISRs that have tight time constraints, the RTOS made it impossible.

As ever, whatever works for you is best, but Nordics stuff is so good it’s worth investing some effort to learn the SDK and the ARM data sheet.

Last, to get power usage that matches Nordic’s online calculator, I had to run bare metal. But it did match or exceed the online calc value.

2 years ago, I investigated nrf52840 boards to make a low power data logger (for rain gauge first) and use BT to unload data (with a goal of 3 years autonomy, at list with a 1/2AA LiSOCl2 battery). Best arduino support seems provided by adafruit but should also apply to sparkfun products (I should check the whole list in your video). Only Adafruit nrf52840 boards provide additional memory available for user, up to 2 MB. I made a first device with the Feather board. Indeed, power consumption at idle (without BT) is between 600 µA and 1 mA, due to the RGB LED that is drawing 600 µA off. I will try to unsolder that LED, which may be more accessible on ItsyBitsy than on Feather. If I can go bellow 100 µA, it should be enough to go for 3 years operation. Otherwise, I may apply other tricks like bypassing the LDO and battery voltage divider (and go for coin cell???).

Greate video,sir you know how to setup internet with cable tv into a certain client on the other side for distribution,

Your video is making me want to switch MCU in my project again, as I’m looking to implement wireless communication, and ESP power consumption is to high. How does NRF52840 ADC performance compare to STM32? Is it somewhat comparable, or is it on ESP32 level and basically needs external ADC?

I have some nice!nano v2 here those have the nrf52 too. They have native battery pins and have a great size to pin ratio.

~25uA average consumption (also measured with PPK2) in my nRF52840 based custom system running what is basically a the UART example (1s announcement interval) + FreeRTOS.
Something is really messed up either in the boards you used or in the Arduino core if your average is ~400uA.

Hello. I just got myself TTGo 1.5 from Aliexpress. It has 16 MB of storage space and pinout was slightly altered, as opposed to 1.4 version. I see that pins 16 and 17 were changed to 25 and 27, accordingly, but can't figure out how to properly edit "pins_arduino.h" table in the "variants" folder of platformio home dir. Can you help me with this? I was able to change board_build.partitions = default_16MB.csv from default one to get more storage but still need to set up those pins.

Thank you for all your videos, especially the ones on antenna tuning!

Can you make any recommendations for low latency applications? I have a time critical application where I’d like to use one or multiple wireless push buttons to trigger an event on an Arduino (e.g. light up different LEDs). The latency should be in submillisecond range (preferably <100us). Thanks!
PS: the protocol needn’t necessarily be Bluetooth

I think all boards get close to the theoretical maximum performance. You just have the trade-off between distance, power and data rate. All boards like the ESP32 which give 20db output on transmit will consume similar power on transmit. The NR52 chips seem to have good receive currents, but then I think this is because the ESP32 are beefier processors. Another thing you can try though is that some chips just give you the RF and leave it up to you to control it with your own processor, and if you want ultra low consumption then some people have tried using and ATtiny chip. After all the sensor only need to be a dumb machine.

The lion kingdom programmed those with just the Nordic SDK & single wire debug. It was possible without any IDE. Only now does it become obvious how hard that was.

are you planning on doing a video on ESP32 S3. I mean comparison with others.

The NRF52 boards look interesting, they are just so expensive IMHO to just play around. They really should end at 10 USD for a fully featured board with USB type-C. The SOC alone is like 4 USD, so it has to be extra markup compared to ESP32 or Pi PICO.

Good to see nrf52 support from so many third parties. Hopefully nordic will have their "official" arduino port.

With so many things to do at hand, there are many who don't want to spend so much of time learning yet another "ecosystem"

And by the way, i am reading english grammar book right, now because i've to un learnt it at school (or maybe just slept in the class).

Does the Xiao have a power regulator? maybe you can fudge some of the feedback values to make it run a little lower.
Perhaps the "power" can be put into a lower power mode via flags.
total guesses

Thanks

This current is literally 20 times higher than what we see with an nrf52832 and nrf52840 in our commercial designs. Yes, it's that bad to use this code. We have a 10 - 15hz keyboard emulator running at 20ua average. If you use the SDK and proper interrupts and such, it beats a lot of this maker stuff. Like there is no reason a ble keyboard couldn't run for months on a cr2032, but most diy stuff is measured in hours on 1000mah rechargeable.

Dear fellow Guy with a Swiss accent
I‘m not sure why and since when, but I consider the Arduino IDE to be bloatware (OsX). As I currently have no low latency projects I have deinstalled it completely and switched to μPython.

Yes, this has limited me in some ways, but I‘ve also noticed that as an engineer I can basically transfer the specifications to Python and it‘s still legible for beginners.

Less hassle for me and my few clients, albeit limitations apply.

Hopefully Arduino will change their approach (maybe they already have?) and maybe even open the IDE to μPython..

Thank you very much for your effort, your content has nonetheless helped me broaden my perspective (and workshop 😅) and I‘ll be replicating your Pöschtler alarm soon.

Bye!

I believe Nordic also support ANT+ and Bluetooth at the same. But had no success in running both at the same time on my Partical boards.

Note that the mbed web IDE also supports at least the older nrf51 chips. The new Keil cloud (free version) replaces this and also supports the nrf52 series. Not many examples available so far however.

FYI: The XIAOs Core ist just a fork of the standard nRF Arduino Core. They just added there board definition.

❤❤️❤️❤️❤️

Grüezi! Does the NRF52 support the Fraunhofer IIS Bluetooth LC3/LC3plus audio protocols?
Did the LC3 codec ever come to your awareness anywhere else?

XIAO means small in Chinese

Cat with microchips know a thing about power use - not quite true, but plenty of space for memes. Seriously tho there is a neat approach to power usage which is used on cat flaps which only open if the animal has an RFID chip whose ID matches a value stored in the door electronics. These doors are usually battery operated - with battery life often greater than a year.
The neat idea is that they do not constantly generate the electrical field which is picked up by the RFID chip and powers it to transmit. Instead the cat door entrance tunnel (about 120mm long) contains an always-on (and very low power) motion sensor which detects the presence of an animal. That then switches on the RFID circuitry, generates the energizing field, and unlocks the door to the right cat.
Having a very low power detector to activate a more power hungry (but smarter) detector is an approach which will be applicable in certain situations. Clever 🐈 😺 🐈 😺.

Great video, with some good questions to inspire makers to discuss and collaborate. :)

Sorry mate, missed this one

Excellent... as usual! As i have frequently commented, I think your videos are generally excellent Really, I think they are. Nonetheless, to increase viewership, I think it would help if you were to create interesting projects such as, "Here's a simple electric heater that can be built for 20 euros that you could use to maintain the temperature of your bath water while you are taking a bath." Or, "For 15 euros a 'let the dog out' reminder can be built. This will send you a message on your phone to remind you to let your dog out within X minutes after his dog bowl has been emptied of food (after he has eaten his dinner)."

Currently, it seems that your channel is unnecessarily too narrowly focused on projects that appeal to, too few people. In addition, your channel could be more interesting for your current viewers. I'm not bashing you at all. This channel is a real gem (treasure). But it's essentially buried treasure because most of its prospective viewers will never watch it. Why not?

A title like, "NRF52 Bluetooth (BLE) Tutorial. Does it consume less than the ESP32? (Feather, XIAO, ItsyBitsy)" probably isn't going to get them to watch, because it's probably unintelligible to them. By contrast, "Keep your wife in hot water with a €20 DIY bath tub heater" is the kind of tantalizing title that probably would appeal to guys who like to build stuff but aren't yet building stuff with microelectronics.

I've been using the Arduino BLE Sense. It has a number of fun sensors. At the moment I convinced it that it is a Bluetooth mouse that moves the pointer based on acceleration values

Platformio appears to be supporting quite a few NRF52-boards, both with the Arduino framework and Zephyr RTOS. Not that I have any experience with these boards or any RTOS - but perhaps it's worth while looking into it again (and to abandon Arduino IDE for good).

Sorry to jump in but was sitting in the front row and missed if you have ever done a video or the T-PicoC3 from LiilyGo? Thank you for your great videos. Go solar!

The Nordic NRF52s need to go down in price and up in Open Source support before I would find them interesting for any practical use. Even bare NRF52840 chips are at a too high price point compared to existing ready-made BLE/ZigBee devices.

Thanks Andreas.

Wasn't the first Arduino with nRF 52840 the Arduino Primo? Would love to see a vid going in depth on the BLE 5 ultra logn range mode.

nordic chips always have some problem in a longrun. They protect their code and sdk. You will have to pay for it eventually

Danke!