Writing test for packet evaluation in BLE

[DevBear]

Hello!

I am an engineering student at KTH studying embedded electronics and I will be doing my thesis work for a company in about 6 months where I am supposed to be analyzing a proprietary protocol and writing tests to check if packets are received correctly between two nRF52840 development kits. I also have a bluetooth sniffer available through the nRF Bluetooth sniffer.

So to be well prepared I have bought these exact boards to try to do this myself with the BLE protocol before diving in to their protocol.

What I am thinking is that I will send packets between the two boards basically and checking if the packets data are received correctly.

Now my problem is that I am very new at this and I am wondering if there is maybe some guide/tutorial on how to achieve something similar and how to "break down" the packets individually and check them for errors. I have already finished the BLE course under DevAcademy which was great for learning about Bluetooth but I felt that it lacked a bit of explanation on how to build a BLE solution from scratch. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong or if there is a better suggestion on how to achieve what I want to do.

[Elfving]

Hello Björn!

Great that you are trying to be well prepared!

So to me this sounds like two questions:

Now my problem is that I am very new at this and I am wondering if there is maybe some guide/tutorial on how to achieve something similar and how to "break down" the packets individually and check them for errors.

In order to get an understanding of how to use the nRF sniffer, there are a few tutorials online. You can for instance see here and here. 

I have already finished the BLE course under DevAcademy which was great for learning about Bluetooth but I felt that it lacked a bit of explanation on how to build a BLE solution from scratch. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong or if there is a better suggestion on how to achieve what I want to do.

In case you skipped the NCS fundementals course, maybe that was what you were lacking?

When it comes to how to build a BLE solution from scratch, I am getting the impression that you'd like to do something more bare-metal? In that case you could always try the nRF5 SDK (see here and here). Or if you'd just like a more complete understanding of the NCS framework and how to use it in order to make a complete BLE solution I'd recommend having a look at the other courses we have available.

Regards,

Elfving

[DevBear]

Hello Elfving!

Thank your for the reply!
I understand that my problems wasn't as clearly stated as I thought. The sniffer I know how to use since I completed the BLE course and I have some previous knowledge in ethical hacking with Wireshark.

You are completely correct about the NCS fundamentals course, I started that today and the first couple of lessons was very helpful!

I am guessing that you are correct about the bare metal programming, I am only used to STM32 and Arduino boards from school projects this is all very new where to look for information. 

What I want to do is to be able to read the packets coming in and in the most simple MVP and then error check them. And I guess that I can't do this with nrf Connect then?

Regards,

Björn