Advanced Bluetooth Low Energy smart door lock enables users to unlock and monitor doors via smartphone

Nordic Semiconductor today announces that DESSMANN (China) Machinery & Electronic Co., Ltd, a Hangzhou, China-based smart home and security company has selected Nordic’s nRF52832 Bluetooth® Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) System-on-Chip (SoC) for its ‘T86-NB Smart Lock’, designed to conveniently and securely unlock doors in a smart-home or -office.

The T86-NB Smart Lock can be retrofitted to an existing door, enabling the user to gain access to their home or office without the need to carry door keys. The door lock can be activated from the user’s Bluetooth 4.0 (and later) smartphone using Bluetooth LE wireless connectivity powered by the Nordic SoC, or alternatively provides fingerprint, password, and mechanical key unlocking options.

Once installed and paired with the user’s smartphone, by using the ‘DESSMANN’ iOS or Android app the user can configure the smart lock, set a password, receive notifications, as well as review records of when the door was accessed. When the user’s smartphone—or the smartphone of another authorized user—is within range of the device, authentication is automatically and securely exchanged between the lock and the smartphone using the nRF52832 SoC’s advanced 128-bit AES encryption, ensuring a secure wireless connection. The smart lock also features NB-IoT cellular wireless connectivity to relay door access data to the Cloud, enabling users to monitor their security when away from the home or office. 

 

The T86-NB Smart Lock employs four AA batteries providing a lifetime of up to 100,000 unlocks for between eight and 14 months depending on usage frequency, thanks in part to the low power consumption of the nRF52832 SoC. The nRF52832 SoC has been engineered to minimize power consumption with features such as the 2.4GHz radio’s 5.5mA peak RX/TX currents and a fully-automatic power management system that reduces power consumption by up to 80 percent compared with Nordic’s nRF51 Series SoCs. The result is a Bluetooth LE solution which offers 58 CoreMark/mA, up to twice as power efficient as competing devices.

 

Nordic’s nRF52832 multiprotocol SoC combines an 64MHz, 32-bit Arm® Cortex® M4F processor with a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio (supporting Bluetooth 5, ANT™, and proprietary 2.4GHz RF protocol software) featuring -96dB RX sensitivity, with 512kB Flash memory and 64kB RAM. The SoC is supplied with Nordic’s S132 SoftDevice, a Bluetooth 5-certifed RF software protocol stack for building advanced Bluetooth LE applications. The S132 SoftDevice features Central, Peripheral, Broadcaster and Observer Bluetooth LE roles, supports up to twenty connections, and enables concurrent role operation.

 

“We selected the nRF52832 SoC as our target chip based on three primary considerations,” says Kentch Jiang, Marketing Director, DESSMANN (China) Machinery & Electronic Co., Ltd. “We had the requirement for low power consumption, complete reference designs, and good technical support. Nordic delivered all three.”