BLE5.0 sw support

[karelchik]

Hi,

Please help me clarify some things about BLE5.0 sw support.

1) As I understand, using BLE5.0 needs having it supported by both sw and hw. Newer ESP modules have BLE5.0 compatible hw according to the datasheets. But from where does the sw support originate from? Which components in ESP-IDF are responsible for the sw support? What changes were made in ESP-IDF to support BLE5.0?

2) I'm using NimBLE. Does BLE5.0 support also depend on which NimBLE stack is used?

3) Is there a way check which BLE version is actually being used?

4) Lastly, ESP-IDF v5.0 rolled out, but I'm not sure what to make of that. At first I thought that this means BLE5.0 support for all the (newer) modules, but then I noticed that some of them already did in v4.x. So why is v5.0 a big deal?

Sorry for n00b questions, I'm new to this.
Many thanks

[chegewara]

1) by newer you mean C2, C3 and S3, old esp32 is BLE4.2 with ble support, thats why its certified BLE5 (to fool new users)
2) see targets here (what features you want to use?):
https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tr ... riodic_adv
https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tr ... iodic_sync
3) for bluedroid you have options to enable BLE5 and BLE42 features in menuconfig, also api is a bit different for both versions, for nimble im not sure, didnt test it with ble5 yet
4) esp-idf 5 is refactored v4, added new chips support, like H2 etc, and many more changes, which are big enough (breaking changes) to increase major version number