Need help with nrf51822 unconnected Advertising Mode (Beacon)

[Mangesh]

Hi,

My project application is to advertise BLE MAC ID (Company's 6 byte Unique ID) with advertising interval of 30 sec i.e. My BLE will transmit its MAC ID & go to sleep mode, wake up after 30 sec re transmit MAC ID & again go to sleep. It repeats this cycle forever.

I already purchased the nrf51822 beacon kit for development & now studying its example code pca20006 on keil, but it consist of LED, switches & API functionality along with DFU & configuration mode, which I really don't want.

Can you please provide simple BLE GAP based unconnected Advertising code example suitable with my application, which will allow me to configure MAC ID & Advertising mode Interval (1 to 60 Sec) with user specific data (up to 20 Bytes), so I can modify it as per my application?

[Einar Thorsrud]

If you are looking for a simple beacon, the Beacon Transmitter Sample Application in the SDK is probably the best example. It is a pure advertiser example with very little unnecessary "bells and whistles".

[Sylvain]

Hello Einar Thorsrud,

Is it possible that I don't find this example for the PCA10056 (nRF52840 PDK) board ?

Do you think that the example for the board PCA10040e will run on my board ?

Kind regards,

Sylvain.

[Einar Thorsrud]

Yes,the SDK do not include an example for the PCA10056. You can use the project for PCA10040 (or PCA10040e), and the beacon itself will work. However, the LED's will not work as the pins are different. You can modify the project to fit PCA10056 by replacing the preprocessor defines  BOARD_PCA10040 with  BOARD_PCA10056, and  NRF52832_XXAA with  NRF52840_XXAA. You need to to a bit more to update everything (flash and RAM size for the linker etc, but atleast that should make it work as expected).

[Sylvain]

Indeed, it's work well ! I will check later for the flash and RAM size.

I'm seing in the example that it's this function to start the broadcast :

err_code = sd_ble_gap_adv_start(&m_adv_params, APP_BLE_CONN_CFG_TAG);

Are there any function to update the data or it require to stop the advertising and then update the parameters and finally restart the advertising ?

[Einar Thorsrud]

You can update the advertising data with sd_ble_gap_adv_data_set(). Please look at existing threads about this or open a new question if you need to discuss further, so that we can keep the number of topics in each thread as small as possible.