Direction finding beacon and 802.15.4 in the nRF5340

Hi Mike

Since the nRF5340 only has one radio, you won't be able to have a direction finding beacon advertising simultaneously as running an 802.15.4 application, but I think you could switch between the two if that's acceptable. 

Please note that a direction finding device will need X amount of time to transmit the IQ samples before giving over the control of the radio peripheral to whatever the 802.15.4 application is doing.

You can use the multiprotocol service layer libraries which provies services for multiprotocol applications alllowing the 802.15.4 radio driver to negotiate transmission timeslots with the radio controller.

Best regards,

Simon

Hi Simon,

Thank you for the speedy reply.

I've taken the approach that you recommend. I started with the samples direction_finding_connectionless_tx and multiprotocol_rpmsg for the nRF5340 and combined the samples. However, I am encountering a hard fault on the application processor when I enable 802.15.4 on the nRF5340.

Bluetooth initialization...ASSERTION FAIL [err == 0] @ WEST_TOPDIR/zephyr/subsys/bluetooth/host/hci_core.c:305
*** Booting Zephyr OS build v2.7.99-ncs1-1 ***
Starting Connectionless Beacon Demo
Bluetooth initialization...

I enable 802.15.4 on the network processor with these configurations in prj.conf:

Hi Simon,

Attached is the zipped up code that I've been using if you would like to check it out. The app core project is "dfc_tx_app" and the network core project is "dfc_tx_net".

Thanks again,

Mike Norton

Timeslot API is only supported with the Softdevice Controller Subsystem (SDC) or 802.15.4 based protocols like Thread or Zigbee.

The Direction Finding transmitter function is only supported in the Zephyr controller today.

This means that today you can't build a network core image that supports simultaneous 802.15.4 and Bluetooth Direction Finding transmission. This is planned supported so you should watch the SDC updates to see when it is added..

Thank you PaKa and Simon,

Do you know when and in which release of the SDK that this feature will be supported?

Mike