nrf5 SDK equivalent of ncs/zephyr bt_monitor

[michael01]

Hi! 

Does the legacy SDK have something like bt_monitor in ncs/zephyr? `

[Hung Bui]

Hi Michael, 
As far as I know there is no equivalent to bt_monitor that you can monitor the HCI communications. 

In nRF5 SDK the host and the controller is encapsulated inside the softdevice and we don't provide logging between these layers to the application. 

You can register an observer (NRF_SDH_BLE_OBSERVER) but it only provides a limited BLE events to the application. 

Best way, in my opinion, to debug BLE application in nRF5 SDK is to use a nRF Sniffer. 

[michael01]

Thanks Hung. Someone made a really cool tool (https://github.com/NovelBits/logscope) and I was trying to see how much support the old nrf 5 SDK can provide here. With NCS you can see RTT and BLE events, and even export to wireshark. 

[Hung Bui]

Hi Michael, 
Thanks for the tip. Seems like an interesting tool. I haven't tried by it but from what I can see in the documentation seem that it would only be able to capture the BLE events reported by the softdevice to the application, not the full HCI communication: 

• Connection events — LE Connection Complete, Disconnect, Connection Update
• PHY management — LE Set PHY, LE PHY Update Complete
• Advertising — LE Advertising Report with AD structure decoding (device name, flags, UUIDs, TX power)
• ATT/GATT operations — Write Request, Read Response, Notifications, MTU Exchange
• Encryption — Encryption Change, Long Term Key Request
• Command Complete — Read BD ADDR, Read Local Version, Read Buffer Size

But I think with these it's already very useful.