cannot talk to dongle after connect

[JimmyD]

I connect to the nRF52840-MDK dongle thru the Serial Terminal (nRF52 Connectivity) it found the comm port and set the baudrate automatically. However, the terminal window constantly fills up the screen with ~/ characters. it repeats every 1 second. What I would like is detailed instructions on how to configure this dongle to be a BT 5 sniffer and read the Extended Advertising for any BT device near the dongle. It would also be helpful to filter the devices seen. Eventually I like to use Python to filter the choices and obtain the advertises data where I can parse the data received. I'm using Windows 10 pro.

Thanks.

[JimmyD]

Is it possible to setup one dongle to request extended advertising and another (sniffer) to read the traffic?

[Hung Bui]

Hi James, 
Yes you can do that. But you will need to flash some code into the dongle to do extended advertising scanning. The sniffer firmware can't do that task. 
You can base on one of our sample in the SDK to modify it so that it would do extended advertising scanning. It's quite straight forward to make one. 

But my suggestion is to verify that your sniffer python code works first by using a phone as the scanner and make sure you can sniff the AUS_SCAN_REQ and the AUX_SCAN_RSP between them.  

[JimmyD]

I tried to just that. I had the phone scan the product that is advertising the data but the dongle did not pick up on it.

Keep in mind that nothing is straight fromward, I would need very specific instructions on how to do this.  Greatly appreciate it; Thanks.

[Hung Bui]

Please clarify:

- If you use the sniffer and Wireshark, you can see the AUX_SCAN_RSP packet when you use the phone to scan

- If you use your python script you can not see the AUX_SCAN_RSP and the AUS_SCAN_REQ packet even with the phone scanning. 

If it's the case, we will need to look into why it happens. The sniffing via Wireshark uses the same Python APIs that we provide.