Cassia Networks has selected Nordic’s nRF52832 Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) System-on-Chip (SoC) for its E1000 Bluetooth IoTEdge Router. The long-range Bluetooth router is designed for enterprise IoT applications including: Industrial, healthcare, smart city, retail, senior care, education, as well as sports.
By employing the Bluetooth 5-certified Nordic nRF52832 SoC, the E1000 Bluetooth IoTEdge Router significantly reduces the cost, and increases the power of long-range IoT gateways. Specifically, the number of Bluetooth LE pairing connections to devices increases, providing up to 40 real-time bidirectional links, bandwidth capacity is doubled, and ‘edge’ processing of third-party applications is enabled.
Cassia claims the E1000 is the first long-range, bidirectional Bluetooth IoT edge processing router for the IoT enterprise market. It extends Bluetooth LE wireless connectivity to over 300 m (with field testing currently at much longer ranges). In bidirectional mode, it controls up to 40 Bluetooth LE devices, while in ‘listening’ mode it can listen to hundreds of devices. Combining the power of the Nordic chip and long-range Bluetooth, the router reduces the cost and complexity of enterprise IoT deployments, especially when compared to using costly smartphones or tablets as IoT gateways. Moreover, the router’s edge processing capability—powered by the Nordic SoC—facilitates new third-party Bluetooth LE applications for the enterprise IoT market.
In an enterprise IoT application, which may use hundreds of long-range Bluetooth routers, seamless configuration and management is delivered using a local server, or the Cloud-based Cassia IoT Access Controller (AC). The Cassia AC allows for the monitoring of thousands of connected devices from a single centralized interface. In addition, a dashboard provides a network data display, single click firmware upgrades, device location management, and encrypted end-to-end security.
Nordic’s nRF52832 Bluetooth LE SoC, a member of Nordic’s sixth generation of ultra low power (ULP) wireless connectivity solutions, combines a 64MHz, 32-bit ARM Cortex M4F processor with a 2.4 GHz multiprotocol radio (supporting Bluetooth 5, ANT, and proprietary 2.4 GHz RF software) featuring -96 dB RX sensitivity, with 512 kB Flash memory and 64 kB RAM. When launched, the SoC was the world’s highest performance single-chip Bluetooth LE solution.
The SoC is supplied with Nordic’s S132 SoftDevice, a Bluetooth 5-certifed RF software protocol stack for building advanced Bluetooth LE applications. The S132 SoftDevice Central, Peripheral, Broadcaster and Observer Bluetooth LE roles, supports up to twenty connections, and enables concurrent role operation.
