How to detect BLE beacons on Android tablet.

[Vihelmi]

Hello, Dear Nordic Development Team.

Recently I made the Android app using nRF nordic SDK to detect BLE beacons(iBeacon and Eddystone). (no.nordicsemi.android.support.v18:scanner:0.1.2) The app works fine on Android phones. But it doesn't work on Android tablet, doesn't detect iBeacon and Eddystons. I use Irulu tablet 5.1 Lollipop. Of course, it supports Bluetooth 4.0. (www.amazon.com/.../B015FK6FOY So I installed nRF Master Control from Google Store on my Irulu tablet, it detects fine all BLE beacons. But other apps of nRF nordic on Google Store don't detect BLE beacons on Irulu tablet. So I thought I missed important permission on Irulu tablet. Please help me how I detect BLE beacons using nRF nordic SDK on Tablet(but phones work well).

Best Regards. Vihelmi Henrik.

[Aleksander Nowakowski]

Hi,

On Android 5.1 no additional permissions, except the android.permission.BLUETOOTH_ADMIN are necessary. The Location permission and Location service enabled are required on Android 6.0 upwards.

As it works on some phone, and doesn't work on your tablet, I assume it related to the Bluetooth chip on the tablet. But you also say, that the nRF Master Control Panel application is able to detect and parse beacons' data. When you use the scanner compat library, do you set any filters? Like for iBeacons or Eddystone? With manufacturer data, or Service UUID? If so, try to call this method with parameter false. Than, instead of relying on hardware filtering, the app will parse the adv data on it's own. I had here some phones with the offloaded filtering failing, that's actually why I have added this and some similar methods.

If you are using nRF for Eddystone app - I guess this app relies on the native BLE scanner (via Nearby API), so it also may have the offloaded filtering issue. The nRF Beacon app also is using the native API inside the nrf-beacon-lib for scanning for beacons.