A Detailed Guide on Bluetooth nRF52 Beacon

As we all know, Nordic has been particularly successful in the 2.4G and BLE fields, and its product stability and superiority are unique. There are different flagship products from the BLE of the previous nRF51 series to the nRF52 series nRF51 series to the nRF52 series. In view of performance, the nRF52832 is even more amazing to the whole market, becoming the object of research and development. After nRF52832, Nordic continues to update its products. The nRF52840, which has been mass-produced, is an upgraded version of nRF52832, with greatly improved performance. In this blog, we will show you the key features and comparison of the nRF52 beacon. Read more:

An overview of Nordic Bluetooth nRF52 series

The nRF52 series beacon has a complete range of specifications and models to meet different requirements of ultra-low-power wireless solutions, and is currently the mainstream product on the market. Nordic has divided nRF52 series into higher-end SoC and lower-end SoC. The nRF52832 in higher-end SoC is undoubtedly the most popular product in this series.

• nRF52 Higher-end SoC

In Nordic’s classification, there are three chips in high configuration nRF52 Bluetooth beacon, including nRF52832, nRF52833 and nRF52840.

The reduction in power consumption and performance improvement are the biggest highlights compared to the nRF51 series, which consumes about 8.3mA to 10 mA, while the peak power consumption of the nRF52832 is only 5.5mA. This is a breakthrough, and the nRF52 series features a 64 MHz ARM® Cortex®-M4F processor that is a big step up from the previous generation.

• nRF52 Lower-end SoC

The lower-end SoC of the nRF52 beacon mainly includes nRF52820, nRF52811, nRF 52810, and nRF52805. The main differences between the nRF52810 and nRF52832 are the Flash, RAM and ARM cores, while the sensitivity, output power and power consumption are the same. Therefore, when Flash and RAM meet the demands, nRF52810 is recommended to be used instead to save more cost.

A feature-by-feature comparison of nRF52 beacon

Differences between nRF51 and nRF52 series

The nRF52 series supports Bluetooth 5.0 and above and consumes about half the power of the nRF51 series. In terms of performance, in addition to larger memory space, it also supports multi-protocol and NFC, relying on the support of protocol stack, and can be used as both master and slave. By comparison with nRF51, the nRF52 series has more options to meet different application requirements and is currently the mainstream product on the market.

The most popular products in the nRF52 series are nRF52840 and nRF52832. However, the nRF52832 has made some adjustments on the performance of the nRF52840, changing the memory from 1 M to 512 K and the FLASH from 256 K to 64 K, and removing the USB function. With the market demand for low cost, Nordic introduced the nRF 52810. The performance of nRF52810 is basically the same as that of nRF52832, mainly reducing FLASH to 192 K and RAM to 24 K, so the two are directly compatible. The newest member of the nRF52 series is nRF52805, nRF52805-CAAA.

Bluetooth 5: longer and faster BLE technology

In truth, Bluetooth 4.0 introduces Bluetooth low energy and Bluetooth 5 takes Bluetooth LE to a new level. The advent of Bluetooth 5 is a huge step forward in the Bluetooth standard, enabling entirely new use cases while improving existing use cases.

Bluetooth 5 has four important new features, as shown below.

• Higher bit rate of 2 Mbps.
• Long range mode with higher sensitivity at two new lower bitrates of 500 kbps and 125 kbps.
• Through advertising extension, the broadcast function has been improved by 8 times.
• An improved channel selection algorithm (CSA#2) that improves channel coordination and coexistence efficiency with other Bluetooth and non-Bluetooth traffic.

Specifically, the nRF52 series multi-protocol SoC is in high performance supporting the Bluetooth 5 standard. Among them, the nRF52840 supports all the new features of Bluetooth 5, including ultra-low power and long range modes. In fact, he nRF52 series devices cover the baseline of Bluetooth 5 devices from universal to highly complex. All devices in the series are supported by a qualified, high-performance, production-grade software stack. Under those circumstances, together they provide unparalleled development options for creating Bluetooth 5-enabled products.

nRF52 beacon for Bluetooth 5 and IoT wireless networks

By providing reliable connectivity to the Internet of Things, Bluetooth 5 extends the reach of Bluetooth wireless networks to smart homes, indoor navigation, and more innovative outdoor industrial and commercial applications. Since Bluetooth 5.0 allows receiving beacon data such as advertisements, beacons, location information, etc. without pairing, the nRF52 ibeacon (beacon) supporting Bluetooth 5 is widely applicable. In addition, the nRF52 ble beacon can be used as indoor navigation beacon, so you can find your way around those very large shopping malls with Bluetooth 5.0-enabled devices.

In addition to Bluetooth low energy, the multi-protocol nRF52 beacon supports Bluetooth Mesh, Thread, Zigbee protocols, and more. It can be configured or debugged by smart devices using Bluetooth Low Energy and interact with mesh networks, making it widely used in other complex IoT applications such as industrial automation.

MOKOBlue is your best nRF52 beacon supplier

MOKOBlue is specializing in delivering various Bluetooth IoT smart devices, including Bluetooth beacons, modules, gateways and more. What’s more, we currently supply nRF52 series Bluetooth modules and Bluetooth beacons, including asset beacon, industrial beacon, PIR presence beacon, etc. If you need more information about nRF52 product, please contact our Bluetooth IoT expert!