I saw a debug application and tool by TI, Its CC Debugger supports CC1101 and many other wirless modules from TI. It makes it really simple to test or setup some module through your PC using TI Smart Studio

I wanted to know if someone ever used something like this for NRF24L01, is there any application and tool to connect NRF24 direct to PC to receive or transmit signal for testing. I understand that NRF24 series is bit old but because i have some in hand and in near past i had some success using them I wanted to explore it further.

 

I saw a debug application and tool by TI, Its CC Debugger supports CC1101 and many other wirless modules from TI. It makes it really simple to test or setup some module through your PC using TI Smart Studio

I wanted to know if someone ever used something like this for NRF24L01, is there any application and tool to connect NRF24 direct to PC to receive or transmit signal for testing. I understand that NRF24 series is bit old but because i have some in hand and in near past i had some success using them I wanted to explore it further.

I just spent time struggling then resolving a problem with some NRF24L01+ devices. Basically some products can misbehave, work in some ways but not others (in my case auto-ack).

https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/nrf24l01-and-auto-ack.206501/

I learned a great deal though and also bought one of these:

https://spidriver.com/

I never used this yet, but one could. In principle one could interact with an NRF device using this (it appears as a simple serial port to Windows).

I could craft a decent Windows app in C# that let's me do all sorts, setup registers, send data, poll status etc. I have a lot of stable code that can be used as a reference, I'd just need to write a simple set of functions for reading/writing the registers I suppose.

The NRF might be somewhat "old" but it's also relatively simple compared to more recent devices that have their own MCU. It's pretty respectable and capable of more than some people might think.

 

@sairfan1

OK I can confirm, I can interact with an NRF24L01+ device from Windows using the "SPIDriver" product.



https://www.spidriver.com/

I just created a crude test .Net app and was able to read the device's CONFIG and EN_AA registers. So there's no reason why I couldn't read/write anything, pulsing CE is easy too because that SPI board provides two GPIO lines so I can use Port A as CE, all very doable.

But interrupts are not possible in the true sense.

I could (if I wanted to spend the time) write a .Net nuget package that would make it very easy indeed to use a PC to talk to NRF24 devices.

.Net and C# have seen many new performance oriented features added over the past few years and with the enhanced use of the "ref" keyword now, it is very easy to pass addresses of structures around without writing unsafe code.

 

This is pretty good, not too much effort now that the interaction wit the SPI hardware is coded:



I can read/write every register easily, when I get some time I will flesh this out some more and add unit tests.

Being able to communicate with a bunch of NRFs from a Windows desktop app will be might powerful...