Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

GK — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 06:53:09 GMT

Hi,

I am working on nrf52832 , SDK15 and softdevice S132.

I was referring to your code to imitata the same with hrs example in SDK 15.

I have hard coded the MAC address , but it is not connecting.

If i disable whitelist it is connecting.

My doubt is , which address(of the phone) should we put?(I am attaching an image)

Or is there any restriction to the adddress type of the address in the phone?

And in which order should the array to be filled?

I have done as follows(the address is shown in the image)

peer_addr.addr[0] = 0xbc;
peer_addr.addr[1] = 0x41;
peer_addr.addr[2] = 0x01;
peer_addr.addr[3] = 0x31;
peer_addr.addr[4] = 0x8f;
peer_addr.addr[5] = 0x48;

Is this the correct way to fill the array?

Thanking you.

with regards,

Geetha

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Joshua Wong — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 10:39:05 GMT

Thank you Petter! I could not have done it without you!

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Petter Myhre — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 09:44:11 GMT

Thanks for sharing Joshua! I'm going to accept your answer and give you a vote :)

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Joshua Wong — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 07:49:30 GMT

I've managed to perform the whitelisting on the Heart Rate example. A big shoutout to Petter for his help and guidance! This would not have been possible without him. The link he posted was very important. I would like to share my code so that anyone that tries to perform whitelisting can refer to this. Beware that it is not 100% bug free and it is only for evaluation purposes.

ble_app_advertiser_whitelist.zip

Setup: You will need to setup GCC with Eclipse in order to compile the codes. I have not done this in Keil so not sure if it is able to.

Steps:

To test this, flash S132 v3.0.0 firmware to nRF52832.
Then, change the bluetooth address to add your own device address to your whitelist in the on_adv_evt() function in the peer_addr.addr variable (under case BLE_ADV_EVT_WHITELIST_REQUEST)
Compile the software
Flash the .hex file into the nRF52832 using nRFgo Studio
On your smartphone device, download the nRF Connect app from the Play Store
Open the app and scan for devices, click on "Connect"
You should be connected to the device.
After that click on the Heart Rate Service and enable notifications to receive heart rate measurements

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Joshua Wong — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 07:42:41 GMT

Oh my gosh it worked!! But I had to use the nRF Connect App in order to test the connection. If I used the HRS central example app, somehow it is not able to connect to the peripheral. I added the smartphone's MAC address to the whitelist and I was able to connect to the nrf52. After that, I removed the device's address from the whitelist and was not able to perform the connection afterwards.

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Petter Myhre — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 14:51:52 GMT

If I answered your question I would appreciate if you would accept my answer by clicking the circle next to it.

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Joshua Wong — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 14:47:00 GMT

Thank you so much for your fast reply! Oh that's interesting! Thank you for sharing this with me. I will look into that and try the ble_advertising_start() only. It looks like this default setting of BLE_GAP_ADV_FP_FILTER_CONNREQ is good enough for me since I would only want to filter connection requests to the peripheral. Thank you so much for your help!

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Petter Myhre — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 14:44:31 GMT

The advertising module will set the filter policy for you, but it seems it will set it to BLE_GAP_ADV_FP_FILTER_CONNREQ. I guess you can modify this to BLE_GAP_ADV_FP_FILTER_BOTH in the library, without affecting anything.

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Joshua Wong — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 14:32:53 GMT

I referred to the documentation and the heart rate application uses the ble_advertising_start() function which comes from the advertising module. Yes I believe I am using the advertising module (sorry this is something new to me). I would actually like to now only use the advertising module since this function makes it a lot easier to set up advertising. By the way, if we don't use sd_ble_gap_adv_start(), how can we set the filter policy? I used sd_ble_gap_adv_start() because it allowed me to set the filter policy in the fp field.

Thank you for confirming the advertising flag! I will try it out and let you know to see if it can solve my error. I will need to further read up on the ble_adv_whitelist_reply() function that you mentioned. Thank you for pointing that out too!

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Petter Myhre — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 11:05:46 GMT

I confirm that only the BLE_GAP_ADV_FLAG_BR_EDR_NOT_SUPPORTED flag shall be set when advertising with whitelisting.

sd_ble_gap_whitelist_set() sets the active whitelist in the SoftDevice, this is done by the advertising module if you call ble_adv_whitelist_reply() when you get the BLE_ADV_EVT_WHITELIST_REQUEST event.

pm_whitelist_set() set the whitelist internally in peer manager, so you can get it later with pm_whitelist_get().

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Petter Myhre — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 11:03:47 GMT

I didn't notice that you were using the advertising module. If you want to use it, you should do like explained here. You can also look at the ble_app_hids_keyboard example on how it is implemented there.

It gets a bit messy if you start calling sd_ble_gap_adv_start() directly in addition to using the advertising module. I would recommend either only use the advertising module, or implement all advertising functionality yourself. What do you want to do?

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Joshua Wong — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 06:58:35 GMT

I did what you had proposed but this time I encounter FATAL error which I believe is reported by APP_ERROR_CHECK(err_code)

Thank you very much for your suggestion! I came across a function called pm_whitelist_set() and pm_whitelist_get(). What is the difference between using pm_whitelist_set() with sd_ble_gap_whitelist_set()? Thank you =)

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Petter Myhre — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 06:41:42 GMT

What if you don't set either BLE_GAP_ADV_FLAG_LE_GENERAL_DISC_MODE or BLE_GAP_ADV_FLAGS_LE_ONLY_LIMITED_DISC_MODE?

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Joshua Wong — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 23:39:28 GMT

Thank you for your reply. I am using BLE_GAP_ADV_FLAGS_LE_ONLY_LIMITED_DISC_MODE as my advertising flag. I have managed to overcome my NRF_ERROR_INVALID_PARAM by setting the adv_params.interval and adv_params.timeout parameters. I am now getting a different error: BLE_ERROR_GAP_DISCOVERABLE_WITH_WHITELIST. Upon further investigation, this macro indicates that "Use of Whitelist not permitted with discoverable advertising". I have already set it to limited discoverable mode.

I found out an important information in the core specification v4.2, Vol 3, Part C, Section 9.2.3 and 9.2.4 (Limited Discoverable Mode and General Discoverable Mode "The Host shall set the advertising filter policy to 'process scan and connection requests from all devices'. So I believe this is why the error persists. May I know what type of advertising flags should I be using? Thank you =)

RE: Whitelisting in S132 v3 for advertising filter policy

Petter Myhre — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 14:29:24 GMT

I'm not sure what is causing this error. What flags are you setting in the advertisments? BLE_GAP_ADV_FLAG_LE_LIMITED_DISC_MODE?