 The great search where lady to try to find that codec thing. Oh, no the great search brought to you by digi key native fruit where we look at Ways for you to find the thing that you're looking for on digikey.com Thanks, did you key lady? No, what is of this week's great search? Okay, so What I wanted to show was I've been hacking this bear and it was kind of cool To see that inside. Oh, sorry. Yes. Yeah, the bear And inside there's this sonic's chip and separately a bluetooth Chips using the nr 51 822 which is a chipset I know and love because We've used it many times To do bluetooth connectivity It's not a very powerful chip. It's like I think 16 or 32 k of flash It's it's very minimal or ram. It's very minimal It's good for bluetooth and but it's like well, why not just have everything run on this chip Well, this was designed in 2017 and this chip is actually a pretty powerful dsp. They can do a lot. It's got native usb. It's got SD card interfacing. It's got built-in audio. It's great for toys Which is what it is. It's a toy chipset or apparently also used for ip cameras So they wanted to add bluetooth. They added it with a bluetooth or energy module now these days the nr 51 is like I mean it's not discontinued. You can still get it, but it's like Very long in the tooth You'll probably want to go with an nr 52 or nr 53 Series that nr 53 is a little newer and the nr 52 is definitely the workhorse Of the nordic family So I thought I'd show that you can get ready-to-go modules at digikey for doing your Either adding bluetooth through an existing design Like it could be that you really cannot run your entire code on the nr 52 Although you should try because it's a cortex m4 chip And so it's quite powerful. You know you'd be so or I think the 52 yeah the 52 840 is a cortex m4 the 832 might be a cortex m3 But they're very powerful processors lots of flash lots of ramps. So you might be able to do a lot of your design completely on that chip In which case you could use a module, you know, you plug it in. Um, it's got the antenna. It's got the Crystals got the passives. It's got everything ready to go. Maybe even certifications Or you can use it like this with You know some other chip that you are forced to use maybe you need a dsp You need uh risk 5 what have you and you can add it as an assistant chip. So Let's go to digikey. I'll just close all these Things about hacking this codec. Um, don't forget digikey no longer has a dash That's big new thing and it's a brighter red color uh So let's go to bluetooth modules And uh, there's a whole area Um for modules and modems There's also separately transceiver ic's but I want in particular. I want to show you guys Um modules that are ready to go. They'll speed up your development greatly They usually come with a variety of different antenna options. They're tend They're certified for fccc etelic You know, whatever which can really speed up your certification process. You'll still need to do it for your your finished product Um, but it's nice if the uh intentional emitter is already done So you don't have to worry about like, uh, is that going to cause me any issues? Let's go with active and uh Let's go with normally stocking What a coincidence 840 that's the nr 52 840 is my favorite and um, so look at what is available down here. Let me just bear out of the way Lots of options. Um, so again the modules they come in various sizes But most of them are very small This one is kind of cool because it's like it's it's just micro miniature. It's got um And so you can look over here. It says which ship this is the nr 52 832 doesn't have native usb Uh, but it's otherwise a very powerful chip with a lot of peripherals. The only thing it doesn't have is usb Uh, the 833 did add usb. I guess I haven't used that particular one But this is very very cute. I like that. It's like it's it's, you know, it's extremely compact It's a little bit more expensive than the non-compact version ubox makes a lot of great modules Uh, I definitely use them. This one is is also tiny You can see the little antenna on there So tiny you need like a macro macro lens to get it The Nordic chipset though u blocks makes modules for it, but they're not the only one Panasonic also makes them as well But in particular, let's look for You can actually search for what chip is inside Uh, which is kind of nice utilized ic part So let's look for the nr f 52 And then uh, we'll just select them all Again, the 52 comes in a couple different configurations the 811 I think is either fewer pins or less ram like there's there's versions of this chip that are um Less ram or less flash less pins, you know, and you'll pay a little bit less for them So depends on uh, whether you Um want the chip to run your entire program. You might need more flash more ram You know, if you're making something like uh, you know those air tags or tiles where it's just wedding a little bit of program or makes a bluetooth beacon Um, you can get away with very minimal flash chips flash pins and Memory so you can see here the different memory configurations up to 1 mega flash and 256 k of ram. That's the nr 52 840 Okay, so looking at pricing Um, there's a few options. So you can get uh, nordic, uh, sorry nordic chips through the mdbt Uh series from ray tack. I've used ray tack. They're great. Um, these modules are fairly easy to place. They come with PCB antennas or chip antennas Usually chip antennas will get you a little bit more range But they're a little more expensive because they have that antenna on there Nothing's cheaper than just a trace on a pcb. So that's uh, Going to be inexpensive. Um, this 84 Sorry nr 52 810 Is also fairly inexpensive. It's about five dollars um this one 192 k of flash 24 k of ram. So It's the it's a little sister to the 840 basically which has uh megabyte of flash and uh 256 k of ram um 52 820 832 let's look at, um, let's now look at marketplace products. We'll just look at what's stocked immediately. I'm the juki So, um, if you're actually looking for like the absolute cheapest Of all time The fan snail modules are going to be very inexpensive. They're they're bare bones, but they work very well They will come with, uh PCB antennas because again, they're very cost effective However, they do all have sec certification Um, if you open up the datasheet, uh, they have telec Australia se I said And they also have a qd id um By the way, you will want that because if you don't have a qd id uh, the bluetooth group will email you and say you have to pay us for a qd id, which I found out After the fact it's not well documented explained. You do need to have it have a qd id So that's quite handy. Um, but almost everything that comes from the Nordic family has it except for the nrf 8001 Which is very discontinued. So you're not going to probably be using that chip But this one's great. I mean, this is um, cortex n4 64 megahertz again. It's uh, The little sister to the 840 Um, just doesn't have a ton of flash and ram only 192k, but that's still a lot Don't forget you're going to have to share that with the soft device that needs to be loaded Don't remember how big the soft device is, but I think it's like about half of that And if you want to do you may not have enough space to do over the air updates because the soft device is taking up space and then Depending on whether you have a bootloader or whether you have how much Over the air slots you want to've got if you don't do over the air, maybe this is okay And only 24k of ram again, you're gonna have to share that with the soft device, but for very simple bluetooth devices You know, this could definitely do the job for you um The 832 is also inexpensive a little under four bucks here, uh, this has um, also 192 Uh k a flash and 24k of ram Um, this one definitely doesn't have uh usb. I don't know if the 805 does sounds like it doesn't but um, the 832 is a slightly older uh family, but Looks like it's still available and we have a core for this chip as well. So Uh, even though we don't support it if you want to get started quickly you can use the 8 of fruit 832 core Um to bootstrap swap your project looks like they have it available also with uh a ufl connector Which is kind of handy if you want to have a nicer antenna So these are uh some options. I say like Kind of hard to beat 250. Um, this is my pick for the great search Very inexpensive bluetooth friend and that's a great church