CC2340R5: Support for External FEM in Zephyr

Hello Hong N,

I hope you are doing well. Looking at your question I wanted to ask which stack is this for (IE BLE, Zigbee, etc). If you are asking if TI offers a "generic" or proprf way of controlling the radio through Zephyr I currently I not think we offer that. 

Thanks,
Alex F

Hi Alex, thanks for your response. This is for the BLE stack.
If there isn't a generic way, does TI offer any way to control an external range extender (any specific range extender?) through Zephyr at all?

Hello Hong N,

I will loop in our BLE expert to see if they have a comment on using range extender with BLE.

Thanks,
Alex F

Hello Hong,

I'm looking into this. Expect an answer by tomorrow!

Best Regards,

Tarek

Hello,

Thank you for your patience! Upon looking into the documentation of the FEM you mentioned, I noticed that it could be simply controlled by GPIOs, which we provide support for in our Zephyr solution. Please let me know if you need help with setting that up!

Does this answer your question or am I misunderstanding?

Best Regards,

Tarek

Hi Tarek,

Could you please provide me more info on how to set that up?

Thank you,

Hong

Hello,

Absolutely! I will make a demo that utilizes this function and attach it to my next response.

Best Regards,

Tarek

Hello,

Please find attached a zip file containing a modified blinky project. The project toggles DIO5 every second, and the commands for setting the GPIO to high or low are also included but commented out. 

This should enable you to control the FEM manually.

 blinky.zip

I hope this helps!

Best Regards,

Tarek

Hi Tarek,

Thank you for your answer. However, my question was if there's a way to have PA TX and RX driven automatically by the radio driver (e.g. asserted exactly on TX/RX start and released after configurable ramp-up/down delays) instead of manually toggling GPIOs in my application.

Does Zephyr SimpleLink have a driver that implements the "generic-fem-two-ctrl-pins.yaml" bindings or any TI-specific PA bindings?

Hello Hong,

I apologize, I forgot to mention that in my response! Yes, I'm currently looking into ways to accomplish this autonomously. I just provided the example above as a suggestion while I look for the correct way to accomplish this in Zephyr.

Best Regards,

Tarek

Hi Tarek,

If that's the case, I'll manually control the PA pins as suggested. Thanks so much for your help!