Before you can program and run any of the examples, you must set up your IoT network.

The following hardware is required:

At least one BLE device

This device can be an nRF51 Development Kit or any other nRF51 device with 32 kB RAM. Before you program an application on the device, make sure to program the IoT SoftDevice.

A BLE enabled router device

This router must support Bluetooth low energy and 6LoWPAN over BLE. You can use any kind of router that fulfills this requirement, for example a Linux computer with a Kernel that has the bluetooth_6lowpan module compiled and enabled (the bluetooth_6lowpan module is supported starting with Kernel v3.17). The SDK examples were tested using a Raspberry Pi with a Bluetooth low energy dongle as router, so the following topics focus on setting up the Raspberry Pi. However, with some Linux knowledge you should be able to transfer the steps to any Linux distribution.

To quickly get started with 6LoWPAN over Bluetooth low energy, follow the step-by-step instructions in the following topics to set up a Raspberry Pi as a Linux border router. With this setup, you can test all delivered examples.

Installing the Raspberry Pi

Accessing the Raspberry Pi

Installing a 6LoWPAN enabled Linux kernel and required modules

Distributing a global IPv6 prefix

Creating link-local IPv6 addresses

Connecting devices to the router