Getting a central device to read advertisements from n beacons simultaneously

[swood]

Hi there, 

Is there a way to get a central device (nRF52840) to read advertising data from several beacons (also nRF52840s) simultaneously? My central is an Arduino Nano 33 BLE with the nRF52840 chip, and I am able to loop through the names of my devices and extract the advertising data in each loop, but this takes a long time. I have an nRF52840 DK that I can use as my central if that's where you have examples showing how I could read data from several devices at the same time. Let me know if this is even possible, and maybe how to do it. Thank you!

[schumac]

This shouldn't be difficult - my nrf52840 has no troubles reading in a LOT of advertising data from around the environment. 

Check out the BLE Central Zephyr examples here: https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/samples/bluetooth/bluetooth.html

[swood]

Does it read it all at once? Or just in rapid succession? 

[schumac]

Its impossible to have truly parallel reads with any BLE device, you only have one radio and all operations need to be sequential. 

[swood]

Okay perfect I'll just keep optimizing my advertising/scanning parameters then through Arduino. Thank you!