To develop software for the VBLUno51 board?

  • VBLUno51 uses the Nordic Semiconductor nRF51822 microcontroller, with a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 core that supports the basic features and interfaces of a microcontroller. The highlight of the nRF51822 is 2.4 GHz wireless communication interface Bluetooth Low Energy (System on Chip). This is the most common interface in IoT systems with proximity, super energy saving, environmentally friendly and common proximity features on smartphone devices.

  • NRF51822 is a BLE chip widely used in the world, many development kits are also based on this chip, so it is supported by many SDK and Embedded OS. Although not as cheap as some of China’s BLE-enabled chips, the nRF51822 has the advantage of being extremely stable and extremely energy-efficient with BLE wireless communication.

  • SDKs and RTOS (open source) that support the VBLUno51 board as follows:

    • Nordic SDK: This is the official SDK for Nordic nRF51, nRF52 chips. This SDK provides libraries for all components within the nRF51822 chip, including the BLE interface library. The Nordic SDK supports IDEs such as Keil MDK, IAR, etc. The difficulty when using this SDK is that programmers need to understand a lot about hardware as well as spend a lot of time learning API functions. .

    • Arduino IDE: Arduino IDE is no stranger to the electronic community, information technology. This is a software development environment with simple, efficient APIs that allow programmers to build applications quickly without having to go too deep into the hardware. VNGIoTLab has reference and development to Arduino IDE support VBLUno, VBLUno51.

    • ARMmbed-OS (2, 3, 5): With the advantage of ARM chip designers, ARM Inc provides a complete platform for developing IoT systems called ARM mbed IoT Device Platform. Important component of ARM mbed IoT Device Platform is the mbed OS - an embedded operating system for ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. Mbed-OS is considered as an embedded operating system very suited for developing IoT systems with basic features such as: security, multiple interfaces, RTOS, popular sensors and peripherals. Especially, it is open-source.

    • Apache Mynewt-OS: This is a real-time, modular embedded operating system for IoT devices. The first wireless interface that this OS focused on was Bluetooth Low Energy 4.2. However, due to the newly developed libraries are not yet rich.

    • RIOT-OS: This OS is for IoT devices, with real-time support for extremely low memory. RIOT-OS can run on 8 bit, 16 bit and 32 bit microcontrollers. It provides network stacks such as IPv6, 6LoWPAN, UDP, CoAP …

    • Zephyr: A small, secure, real-time operating system with micro-nano kernel architecture, Bluetooth, Bluetooth LE, WiFi, 802.15.4, 6Lowpan, CoAP, IPv4. , IPv6, and NFC. In February 2016, Zephyr became a project of the Linux Foundation.

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Conclusion: To approach and master quickly the VBLUno51 board as well as Bluetooth Low Energy communication for IoT applications, we recommend developing application for the VBLUno51 board using Arduino and ARMmbed-OS. These two frameworks are received the interest of the IoT community and to develop a lot of examples. Moreover, their library is easy to learn and use.