Nordic Semiconductor announced that Shenzhen, China-based technology developer Mo Young Ltd. has specified Nordic’s nRF52840 Bluetooth 5.2/Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) advanced multiprotocol System-on-Chip (SoC) to provide the core processing and wireless connectivity for Shenzhen Leadoys Technology’s ‘Leadoys C16 Smart Watch’.
The C16 Smart Watch is a stylish wearable providing users with an array of activity tracking functions including twenty sports modes, a pedometer feature, calorie and motion tracking, sedentary reminders, as well as social media notifications and call reminders. In addition, the smartwatch provides health data including sleep and 24-hour intelligent monitoring of the user’s heart rate and blood oxygen level.
Using Nordic SoC-enabled Bluetooth LE connectivity, this data is relayed from the watch to the user’s paired Bluetooth 4.0 (and later) smartphone, from where an iOS and Android companion app can be used to customise the device, input personal information, and view graphical representations of current and past data from all sports modes and health functions.
Nordic-powered data processing capability
The sensor and algorithm data processing capability for the C16 Smart Watch is powered by the Nordic nRF52840 SoC’s 64 MHz, 32-bit Arm Cortex M4 processor with floating point unit (FPU). The Arm Cortex M4 processor is designed to support the floating point and digital signal processing computations typical of high-end wireless applications. The processor is combined with a 2,4 GHz multiprotocol radio (supporting Bluetooth 5.2, ANT, Thread, Zigbee, IEEE 802.15.4, and proprietary 2,4 GHz RF protocol software) and a generous 1 MB Flash and 256 KB RAM memory allocation.
The watch is IP67 rated, making it waterproof up to 30 metres, and uses a 350 mAh battery for 45 days of standby time or 10-15 days of operation before recharging, thanks in part to the ultra-low-power characteristics of the Nordic SoC. The nRF52840 has been engineered to minimise power consumption with a fully automatic power management system that reduces power consumption by up to 80 percent compared with the nRF51 Series.
The nRF52840 provides full Bluetooth 5 support including 2x on-air raw data bandwidth (2 Mbps); 4x range; 8x broadcasting ability with advertising extensions that increase the advertising packet payload size to 251 Bytes; and an improved channel coexistence algorithm. The SoC is supplied with Nordic’s S140 SoftDevice, a Bluetooth 5.2-certified software protocol stack for building long range and high data throughput Bluetooth LE applications.
Nordic’s unique software architecture includes a clear separation between the RF protocol software and the developer’s application code, simplifying development and ensuring the SoftDevice didn’t get corrupted when Mo Young was developing, compiling, testing, and verifying the application code. The S140 SoftDevice offers concurrent central, peripheral, broadcaster, and observer Bluetooth LE roles, and supports high-throughput and long-range modes as well as advertising extensions.
“The most important hardware features of Nordic’s nRF52840 for the C16 Smart Watch were the powerful Arm CPU capacity, large memory capacity, low power consumption for longer standby times, and the fact it enables very smooth, low-latency touch response at an extremely high resolution,” said Justin Zhang, chief technology officer at Mo Young.
“The key software features of the nRF52840 that aided our decision were the separation of application code and SoftDevice, enabling pure development and greatly reducing the rate of software errors. The Nordic SDK data is comprehensive, which greatly reduces development costs and any development difficulties.
“As a company, Nordic has provided us with great technical information and reference designs to aid the development process.”
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