Nordic BLE Sniffer Corrupted

[Dave_couling]

It seems after my last round of Window 8.1 updates the Nordic Sniffer no longer functions properly. When I run the Sniffer software, it only can scan for about 1 second before timing out. If I press 'l' to re-scan it cannot perform the operation. If I click 'w' to connect to Wireshark, the Nordic Sniffer software cannot seem to transfer over to Wireshark. No advertisement appear on Wireshark. I've tried several fresh installs of several different versions of Wireshark, but to no luck. I'm worry it is a compatibility issue with the Nordic Sniffer software. Is this a known issue?

-DC

p.s. I've also tested on several PCA10000 dongles and re-flashed to be certain.

[Paolo D]

It looks like the problem is related to the firmware on the dongle's J-Link. I was able to find a workaround: I uninstalled the nRF5x command line tools package and installed the old nRFTools v7.5.2 package, which installs the J-Link driver version v498c. I ran the J-Link Commander tool (JLink.exe) from this version of the J-Link driver and let it downgrade the dongle's J-Link firmware to "J-Link OB-SAM3U128 V1". After downgrading it, the sniffer started working again and I uninstalled the old nRFTools and reinstalled the latest tools.

[David Edwin]

You do not need the nRFTools v7.5.2 only the specific segger jlink software for windows:

nRF51-DK(PCA10028) or nRF51-Dongle(PCA10031) You need to use 5.10n as linked in this blog post and follow the troubleshooting guide to downgrade all your boards to 5.10n. Verify that you have downgraded by using jlink configurator (jlinkconfig.exe) in the 5.10n version of segger jlink. The version for the "host firmware" and "emulator firmware" should be identical.

For PCA10000 and PCA10001 you need to use Segger jlink version 4.98c and follow the same instructions as above.