Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

David Edwin — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 08:42:16 GMT

Re-iterating that the method to establish connections is already available in the github repo mentioned in my answer. However this is limited only to the peripheral role, you still need to use the master role from the Softdevice for connections. Would this address your issue.

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

David Edwin — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 12:38:49 GMT

@Marius I agree that it should be done in the softdevice, however the timelines are not easy to control, If you implement it in the timeslot API, you are in better control of timelines and also have the ability to use it with multiple softdevices (as you will not depend on a specific softdevice). There is a lot of code on advertising on the Timeslot API and more on the way.

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

Marius Heil — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 10:42:17 GMT

Any news if this will be supported by the SoftDevice? I would rather not implement the advertiser using the timeslot API. I guess this adds a lot of overhead to replace something that is already nearly implemented in the SoftDevice.

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

David Edwin — Sun, 12 Jun 2016 23:09:39 GMT

I agree this is useful. You can add this functionality using the timeslot API which can be used to support the additional advertiser with the interface that you need. The basics of running the advertiser is available in github, see github.com/.../Advertiser-With-and-Without-Timeslot . You can also support iBeacon/Eddystone/Altbeacon using this method. The example also supports the establishment of connections with the timeslot API but only in the peripheral mode.

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

Anne van Rossum — Sun, 05 Jun 2016 11:14:14 GMT

I second this request. From the softdevice point of view this requires multiple buffers and a pointer that iterates over these. This seems like quite a trivial change and for the user it will not have any limitations on timings, etc.

sd_ble_gap_adv_data_set(uint8_t const *const  	p_data,
	uint8_t  	dlen,
	uint8_t const *const  	p_sr_data,
	uint8_t  	srdlen 
)

Would become something like:

sd_ble_gap_adv_data_set(uint8_t const *const  	p_data,
	uint8_t  	dlen,
	uint8_t const *const  	p_sr_data,
	uint8_t  	srdlen, 
	uint8_t  	buf_id 
)

From a marketing point of view it's cool that you can tell that you inherently support multiplexing (the three formats of) Eddystone with iBeacon and AltBeacon.

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

endnode — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 16:00:24 GMT

Hi Marius,

changing advertising (+ scan response) data through Radio Notification Event is pretty simple and works well. You can (as long as you are fine with some obvious limitations on selected timings) "multiplex" two or more broadcasts just by using standard advertisement in GAP Peripheral of Nordic's Soft Devices. And if you would like to pretend to be multiple of completely independent devices, you could probably very well also change Adv. Address (still you need to select right advertising interval so "virtual" devices appear with effectively double/triple/... interval to the observer). Need an example? I've already posted here on the forum source code which makes Nordic standard Beacon app from SDK changing broadcasts for each interval (adjusting it to your needs looks like trivial few minute job)

Cheers Jan

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

Marius Heil — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 14:55:15 GMT

Yes, it's not only advertising, but sometimes I want to establish connections and it would be quite a bit overhead to use the timeslot API.

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

Hung Bui — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 13:49:28 GMT

I see, if you don't care about connection establishment you can do advertising in a radio timeslot instead of using the softdevice's API, but I guess in your case you need the connection be handled by the softdevice.

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

Marius Heil — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 13:22:58 GMT

Thank you. Yes, it would be okayish, but it would be much nicer to have better control, so that all messages are sent the same amount. And for my use-case with a mesh, I really need better control over the advertising messages and for me, this is one part where the API is really lacking functionality and I cannot find a way around.

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

Hung Bui — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 13:18:22 GMT

I understand, Marius. I guess for the beacon application, it would be OK to use a timer to switch between Eddystone and iBeacon as timing and sequencing are not very important.

I will send your request internally to R&D for assessment.

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

Marius Heil — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 12:29:10 GMT

But what happens if a beacon wants to advertise both EddyStone and iBeacon messages? I think that's a very simple use-case and I do not see any clean solution to achieving this.

Wouldn't it be possible to include the type of radio activity in the radio notification callback? Just a simple unsigned short would be enough to distinguish between the different kinds of radio activity. Or is this very problematic from the SoftDevice Architecture?

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

Hung Bui — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 12:10:27 GMT

Hi Marius,

I don't think what you request is very common, I haven't seen many applications require that (or simply ok with the scan response).

I can't think of a clean solution for this. What you described of using a timer maybe the closest on what you can do to achieve.

I am also thinking of counting the distance between Active and nActive radio notification signals to measure the size of the packet. And if you have a fixed length of 31 bytes payload for the advertising packet, there is a chance that you can distinguish between a connection event packet (max 36 bytes) and a advertising packet (max 46 bytes). Of course there is a chance that the radio notification be skipped because of 2 radio events are too close. But if that's the case I would hope that the timing can also point out that it's a connection event + advertising event or not.

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

Marius Heil — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 07:18:14 GMT

Has to be advertising messages because of interoperability with other devices.

RE: Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

Wojtek — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 15:18:49 GMT

If two advertising messages are enough, why don't you use scan response?