Nordic Semiconductor today announces that it has launched ‘nRF Connect for Cloud’, a free service for Cloud-based evaluation, test, and verification of Bluetooth® Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) designs employing Nordic’s nRF51 and nRF52 Series multiprotocol Bluetooth LE Systems-on-Chip (SoCs).
nRF Connect for Cloud features an intuitive workflow and offers much of the functionality of Nordic’s ‘nRF Connect for Desktop’ and ‘nRF Connect for Mobile’ which are popular applications used for building and developing Bluetooth LE products. nRF Connect for Cloud also supports an extensive range of standard Bluetooth services together with proprietary services such as nRF UART.
Operating with all popular browsers, nRF Connect for Cloud uses Web Bluetooth application programming interfaces (APIs) to push and extract data to and from the Cloud, enabling the developer to test and modify the behavior and performance of prototypes. By using the front-end and visualization features of nRF Connect for Cloud, historical data can be extracted from databases and analyzed in a browser. The product also allows engineers to monitor and interact with remote wireless Internet of Things (IoT) designs enabling the collaboration of geographically separate development teams on a single project.
nRF Connect for Cloud is supported by the nRF Gateway App available for iOS and Android-powered mobile devices. The nRF Gateway App enables Nordic Bluetooth LE devices to use a smartphone-enabled Internet gateway to convert Bluetooth LE messages to ReST/MQTT/IP protocols for Cloud interoperability.
The Gateway App communicates with the nRF Connect for Cloud back-end hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is based on Software as a Service (SaaS) components. By leveraging AWS industry-grade components, the app implements end-to-end data and device connectivity, guarantees reliability, and scales from a few to hundreds of Bluetooth LE devices.
nRF Connect for Cloud currently supports Bluetooth LE solutions but future versions will also support Nordic’s nRF91 Series low power, global multimode LTE-M/NB-IoT System-in-Package (SiP) for cellular IoT. Following Nordic’s established strategy of constant enhancements to its development tools, planned updates for the nRF Connect for Cloud will reinforce its position as an indispensable tool for wireless IoT development teams working with Nordic products.
“nRF Connect for Cloud is a great asset for the rapidly expanding number of development teams building distributed IoT systems that use Bluetooth and other wireless connectivity technologies to connect to the Cloud and back-end systems,” says John Leonard, Product Marketing Manager, Nordic Semiconductor. “The product shortens the previously time-consuming migration from device-to-smartphone to device-to-Cloud connectivity and simplifies integration of Nordic wireless products into the larger systems that make up the IoT.”
nRF Connect for Cloud works out-of-the-box with the Nordic Thingy:52 IoT Sensor Kit, Nordic nRF5 development kit (DK), and software development kit (SDK) examples. A quick-start guide is available from www.nrfcloud.com.
