Using Boron with Adafruit BLE

[hlee6]

Hi there,

We've been using the BLE chip from Adafruit mentioned below till now with our Electron for our product:

What are the current options for supporting Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)?

So I have two Electrons and they are working quite well! I’ve been looking into adding BLE support to talk to some local devices, and the only references I can find are two years old. Obviously things can change a lot in a year or two, so I wanted to see if there are any recommendations on connecting BLE hardware to an Electron, and to see what sort of results others have had in this area. Thanks for any insight and updates!

But with Boron, we get this error:

lib/Adafruit_BLE/errors.h:196:3: conflicting declaration 'typedef enum err_t err_t' (using Adafruit BLE library)

We think it's an error due to Boron's BLE libraries being in conflict with the Adafruit BLE library.

Any recommended solutions? We ordered five Borons before encountering the problem, should have checked earlier... Hope you can help!

[will]

Hey there!

Although we leverage the Bluetooth radio during the setup process, we do not yet support Bluetooth at the user firmware layer via the Particle Device OS for the nRF52840. This is a high priority feature after we solve the initial mesh stability issues, and is likely why you’re having issues compiling the Adafruit Bluetooth library for your Boron.

[hlee6]

Thanks for the quick reply! Then should we stick with Electrons if we want to use Adafruit BLE chips in the short term? And when do you expect the issue to be worked on?

Thank you!

[ScruffR]

@hlee6

lib/Adafruit_BLE/errors.h:196:3: conflicting declaration ‘typedef enum err_t err_t’

Are these the only errors that get reported?
If so, you could try a local copy of the Adafruit_BLE library which you can then namespace to not conflict with other definitions of err_t which is widely used in the Particle firmware repo for multiple purposes (also namespaced).

But since @rickkas7 is the contributor of this library, he might find a more sustainable way to leverage this issue (filed on GitHub)

[Mesh] Conflict in use of err_t when building for mesh

[rickkas7]

Version 0.0.3 of the Adafruit_BLE library fixes this issue. You can now use the library on mesh devices.

[hlee6]

Amazing. Thank you!

[Jean-Pierre]

Does this mean that we can use the BORON to detect ble beacon

[ParticleD]

Not yet, at least using the Boron’s BLE radio. Until the BLE API is implemented, you would have to use an external BLE radio. As Will said, it is a high priority project for our engineering team to get the API up and running.