Beacon output suddenly stops

[hiroiwas]

Hello.

In the BLE software being developed, the device uses nRF52840, s140 v7.2.0 or v7.3.0, and I am building a system that periodically sends a beacon (ADV_NONCONN_IND) in the peripheral role at the same time as scanning in the central role.

In the software currently under development, after setting a beacon (ADV_NONCONN_IND) and executing ble_advertising_start, the advertisements at the set interval suddenly stops after a while.

The time it takes for the problem to occur varies, ranging from a few hours to several tens of hours, and other functions appear to be working fine even after the problem occurs.

The operation of this device is to continuously perform a sequence of transmitting beacons, connecting in a central role based on advertisements from external devices that capture the beacons, and then disconnecting after communication.
For this reason, the central role frequently start and stop scanning, connects and disconnects, but the peripheral role's beacon output has never stopped since the start advertising.

I believe that the output of ADV_NONCONN_IND started with ble_advertising_start will not stop unless sd_ble_gap_adv_stop is executed, but is it possible that external factors such as SCAN or connection of the central role can stop advertising of peripheral roles?

Also, as a failsafe, we are considering implementing code that monitors the advertisement output and restarts it when the advertisement stops, but is there a way to detect that the ADV_NONCONN_IND has been output to RADIO?
I looked into Radio Notification, but since the event callback can only receive the radio_active state, I determined that it is not possible to capture only the advertisement output in a multi-role operating environment.

Please give me some advice.

best regard.

[Simonr]

Hi

I'm sorry you're being sent in a loop here, but now Hieu is out of office. I haven't had time to get into this case, but I have pinged the devs looking at this internally, and will let you know if they have any updates.

Einar who initially had this ticket will return on Monday July 29th and likely take back this case then. So sorry about all the delays.

Thus far I'm afraid there's no further updates from our side. You say that the full log can't be uploaded. Would it be possible to upload it with Google Drive or similar so we can download it on our end from there? Alternatively you can send it by mail to me, but for the mail address I'll reach out to you in direct messages if that's what you prefer.

And just a shot in the dark from me, how many devices has the beacon connected to when this issue occurs. Could it be that the maximum number of connections is reached, and that's why the advertiser won't start again, since it seems to happen after a connection event if I'm not mistaken.

One option you could try is to add a watchdog timer that will reset the device if no BLE events trig in X amount of time. Use the WDT example for reference here.

Best regards,

Simon