Bluetooth solution areas

Bluetooth® technology provides full stack support for a wide and expanding range of use cases.

Audio streaming

The nRF Connect SDK supports the Bluetooth LE Audio standard, including Auracast™ (broadcast) audio. See nRF5340 Audio applications to get started.

Note that Nordic Semiconductor SoCs do not support Bluetooth Classic Audio, which is based on the Bluetooth BR/EDR radio.

Data transfer

Data transfer is the main use case area for Bluetooth LE and covers use cases like wearables, PC peripherals, and health-related devices. Supported use cases for Bluetooth LE are implemented as Services and Profiles on top of the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT).

Support in the nRF Connect SDK:

• nRF Desktop: Reference design for a Bluetooth Human Interface Device (HID) solution. Includes desktop mouse, gaming mouse, keyboard, and dongle.

• Bluetooth samples (nRF Connect SDK): Bluetooth samples, most of which are data transfer related. The following samples are recommended to get started with Bluetooth:

  • Bluetooth: Peripheral LBS: This sample implements controls for buttons and LEDs on various hardware platforms from Nordic Semiconductor. The GATT Service is not a Bluetooth standard, so the sample is a good template for implementing vendor-specific profiles and services.

  • Bluetooth: Peripheral UART and Bluetooth: Central UART: These samples implement a Nordic-defined GATT service and profile that give a simple TX/RX generic data pipe, providing UART communication over Bluetooth LE.

• Bluetooth samples (Zephyr Project): The Zephyr Project offers additional Bluetooth samples. These samples are not guaranteed to work as part of the nRF Connect SDK, but are helpful as starting point for a relevant use case.

Device networks

Bluetooth Mesh is a technology that enables large-scale device networks in a many-to-many (m:m) topology, with focus on reliability and security. The support in the nRF Connect SDK includes the Mesh Profile, Mesh Models, Bluetooth Networked Lighting Control (NLC) profiles, and related application examples. See the Bluetooth Mesh main page for further details.

Periodic Advertising with Response (PAwR) allows a central device to communicate with any number of devices in a star topology. The feature is support in SoftDevice Controller, and the related Encrypted Advertising (EAD) feature is supported in Zephyr Host. The main use case, Electronic Shelf-Labels (ESL), has an experimental implementation as the nrf-esl-bluetooth application in the Nordic Playground.

Location services

In addition to the various forms of data transfer, Bluetooth technology includes methods for device positioning.

Presence

Bluetooth advertising is an easy way to indicate presence of a device to a nearby scanner. These kinds of solutions are known as Bluetooth beacons and work as a foundation for many solutions for tracking and item finding.

Nordic Semiconductor offers full implementation of two solutions for item finding:

• Google Find My Device Network: See the Bluetooth Fast Pair: Locator tag sample for an implementation of a tag device.

• Apple Find My Network: See Integrations page on how to apply for access.

Direction

The nRF Connect SDK includes 4 samples related to Bluetooth Angle-of-Arrival (AoA) technology, which allows to find the direction from which a Bluetooth signal is transmitted:

• Bluetooth: Direction finding connectionless locator

• Bluetooth: Direction finding connectionless beacon

• Bluetooth: Direction finding central

• Bluetooth: Direction finding peripheral

Distance

Channel sounding is an upcoming feature in the Bluetooth specification that allows distance measurement between two devices. The measurement is based on round-trip timing (RTT) and phase-based ranging (PBR).