Hi,
I have 3 NRF52840 dongles plugged in a Raspberry Pi 3B+. One of them is used to communicate with my phone with BLE, and on the two others I have loaded the NRF Sniffer to sniff that connection and another one. The Raspberry Pi is running Linux and I am using the python API to communicate with the sniffer dongles, saving the sniffed packets in a separate file for each sniffer.
The sniffers have two issues:
- It misses the connection when it is formed. In this case the sniffer It detects the first few packages sent when initiating the connection, but then does not detect anything,
- It correctly sniffs the creation of the connection, but some of the correctly sent packets are not detected at all. RSSI shouldn't be an issue as the two dongles are side by side in the Raspberry Pi USB ports, and the communicating dongle has RSSI <-70.
I have read that the dongles are not well supported by Linux and work better with Windows. This was also true for me as I had no issues using the with WireShark on Windows. But for my application I will have 8 Rasberry Pis with a communicating dongle and two sniffer dongle in each of them. I do not know if it is possible to run 16 total sniffers in one Laptop using USB extenders to increase the number of USB ports for the sniffer.
At first I thought the issues might be caused by the ppm, since I haven't modified the communicating dongles and assume they are using the internal RC for the clock, which is 500 ppm if i'm not mistaken. I saw no options in the API to change the sniffers' ppm, and since they worked correctly on Windows I do not think this is the cause. I also tried different connection intervals and had the same problems with low and high intervals.
Do you have any suggestions on how to make the sniffers work correctly on the Raspberry Pis, or is that not possible and I should definitely use a Windows device for them?
If i should definitely use the sniffers on a windows device, do you have any suggestions on how to run 6-16 sniffers on the same laptop?
Kind regards.
