Partnership delivers device reliability to Bluetooth low energy IoT products

The updated integration gives nRF52 and nRF53 Series developers the same streamlined experience as nRF91 Series developers with an out-of-the-box integration of the Memfault platform to accelerate product development, de-risk product launches, and ship more robust, always-improving products.

"Partnering with Memfault has enabled Nordic customers to maintain and improve their devices more efficiently with deep insights into deployed devices’ performance,” said Kjetil Holstad, EVP of Product Management at Nordic Semiconductor. “Enhancing this partnership with a deeper Memfault integration into our Bluetooth Low Energy chipsets will make it easier than ever for developers to accelerate time-to-market and deliver feature-rich products at scale."

Building devices that utilise Bluetooth Low Energy introduces unique performance and debugging challenges that make access to field diagnostic data critical to delivering a successful product. These challenges include wireless range and communication stability in real-world environments, connection handshaking and performance with varied Bluetooth LE gateways and mobile devices, battery life optimisation, and many more.

Memfault’s IoT reliability platform helps capture relevant metrics and issue data remotely from the devices operating in development or production, develop fixes or improvements, and monitor updates across hardware and software releases. The nRF Connect SDK v2.1.0 enables rapid creation of a data pipeline for the nRF52 and nRF53 Series to the cloud and out-of-the-box device debugging and fault analysis capabilities. It includes Memfault SDK examples and template gateway applications for both Android and iOS developers so developers can get started in minutes. With no cost for up to 100 devices, teams using Memfault and Nordic can begin using Memfault for small fleets of development devices for free.

"Integrating Memfault's device reliability platform into our Nordic chipsets, which enabled Bluetooth LE communication for WHOOP 3.0 and 4.0, allowed our team to access high quality field diagnostics data from our wearable technology and improve product performance,” said Bill Diken, Director of Embedded Engineering at Whoop. 

“Memfault is excited to deepen our partnership with Nordic and give Bluetooth LE device developers easy access to our IoT reliability platform,” said Francois Baldassari, CEO of Memfault. “Nordic has always demonstrated its commitment to developers and has consistently encouraged regular improvement to the development process. Pairing Memfault’s capabilities with Nordic’s products will give Bluetooth LE developers the tools and support to build better products and the visibility crucial to delivering a quality connected product that today’s consumers expect.”

Once the Memfault SDK is deployed on the nRF52 or nRF53 Series, Memfault’s intuitive cloud portal alerts developers immediately when a bug occurs. Users can see the status of the device fleet and detailed reports with tailored diagnostic information for analysis at the time the fault occurred. Developers can see whether issues have the same provenance through Memfault’s fault aggregation and deduplication techniques, which show the occurrence of a specific fault across the entire population of devices.

Available data includes the frequency of occurrence, number of affected devices, and fault occurrence timeline to assist users in identifying unique issues, such as whether a specific device type or software update could have resulted in a fault and the impact of the fault. With this information, developers can root cause the issue and publish a fix using Memfault’s OTA update capabilities.

Memfault recently joined Nordic Semiconductor as a member of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), which has over 35,000 member companies that have collectively certified and deployed over 5 billion Bluetooth-enabled devices. Memfault and Nordic are also both members of the Zephyr Project. Memfault and Nordic already share customers across many Bluetooth LE devices across industries and use cases, such as asset tracking, audio, wearables, and access control.

100 devices connected for free

The Memfault platform is now supported across most Nordic product lines. Nordic customers can register to the Memfault platform a dedicated registration link to get up to 100 devices connected for free.

Webinar

Join the upcoming webinar on November 30 to learn more about the new integration.