Nordic solution adds wireless control of home appliances to smart home ecosystem

     Wonderlabs' SwitchBot smart home ecosystem uses nRF52840 and nRF51822 SoCs for smartphone application control, and technology company Wonderlabs Limited has selected Nordic's nRF52 and nRF51 series of Bluetooth® Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) SoCs (SoC) for its "SwitchBot" smart home ecosystem.

     This smart home ecosystem includes the SwitchBot shade with the nRF52840 Bluetooth 5.2/Bluetooth low energy advanced multiprotocol SoC and the SwitchBot robot with the nRF51822 SoC, as well as other Nordic-based sensor-based smart home devices and peripherals that can stand alone use, or with each other via a proprietary Bluetooth mesh networking solution.

     The Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity enabled by Nordic SoC ensures that SwitchBot products can be configured and controlled wirelessly via the associated iOS/Android "SwitchBot" app on the user's Bluetooth 4.0 (and higher) smartphone. The multi-protocol support provided by the Nordic solution works with a proprietary Bluetooth-based mesh network in which multiple SwitchBot devices communicate seamlessly.

     Founder and CEO Connery Li said: "We chose the Nordic solution for SwitchBot because of the chipset's high reliability and low power consumption, as well as support for advanced features such as Bluetooth 5 and long-range. Furthermore, our own Bluetooth The mesh protocol requires multi-protocol support, and it uses on-demand routing instead of flooding."

     "Nordic's sales and support team has a strong technical background and is very professional compared to other semiconductor suppliers, and can respond to customer inquiries quickly and efficiently."

     The SwitchBot Curtain is a 135g, 42 x 51 x 110mm motorized device that is easy to install and can convert existing curtain rod and track curtains into an automated smart curtain system controlled by a companion app that can be remotely controlled by an integrated nRF52840 SoC It can also be controlled by a compatible smart home ecosystem, such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and HomePod, or Google Home. With built-in sensors, the device can schedule curtains to close at night and open when daylight is sensed. SwitchBot shades use a rechargeable 3350mAh Li-ion battery, and Nordic's nRF52840 provides full Bluetooth 5 support for SwitchBot shades and shade remotes, including twice the wireless raw data bandwidth (2Mbps), four times the transmission range, and eight times the advertising extension (will Advertising packet payload size increased to 251 bytes) broadcast capability, and improved channel coexistence algorithms.

     Nordic's nRF52840 advanced multiprotocol SoC combines a 64MHz, 32-bit Arm® Cortex® M4 processor with a floating point unit (FPU) with a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio (supports Bluetooth 5.2, Long Range, Bluetooth mesh, ANT™, Thread , Zigbee, IEEE 802.15.4, NFC and proprietary 2.4GHz RF protocol software) with 8dBm output power, -95dBm RX sensitivity, 103dBm link budget, 1MB Flash and 256kB RAM. Its dynamic multi-protocol capability uniquely supports concurrent wireless connections of these protocols. This SoC has 12Mbps full speed USB. The nRF52840 SoC integrates the ARM® CryptoCell-310 cryptographic accelerator to provide best-in-class security for Cortex-M based SoCs.