Read long characteristic as ble central

[RomainQ]

Hi, First I'd like to salute the great work done by you Nordic people for those open source and hardware. I just installed the SDK 10.0.0, S120, gcc-arm toolchain, configure my Mac OSX, plug my RedbearLab Nano ... and it JUST WORKS! Impressive.

But ... there is always a but ;) I need to read a long characteristic from a peripheral (I can't modify it). So I configured my Nano as a central, pair, bond, get characteristic change notifications. All is working, except I just receive 20 bytes where I should receive 45 or more.

I read that the MTU of SoftDevice 120 is limited to 20 user bytes. Well, ok, all buffers are limited in size. What I don't understand is why SoftDevice is not able to get the data in multiple batches as I am now forced to do with the GATTC (multi) read via offsets ?

It would help a lot if this could work, save power and code !

Thanks,

Romain

[run_ar]

We had an internal discussion how to do this, and it was decided that this should resemble the size of the payload sent on air. This way we avoid having to allocate a lot of memory internally in the Softdevice to handle long reads, instead this has to be handled by the application. This way it's easier to manage memory usage in a wide variety of applications. The size can vary quite a lot, and the application doesn't necessarily know how many packets will be sent on air. Alternatively, if we did this procedure in the Softdevice, we would need large buffers both in the Softdevice and in the application.

[run_ar]

1. Yes, I agree this should have been stated in the API documentation as well. I'll create a suggestion for that.
2. The 7 bytes is protocol overhead. Is there a particular reason why you want that forwarded to your application?