BLE Advertisement Simulator Tools

RE: BLE Advertisement Simulator Tools

Wojtek — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 01:22:24 GMT

I don't have any specific projects that would need 32k ram, so don't need qfac so much, but it would be nice if they just sold modules with better chips :) hope nRF52 will have cheap modules soon too.

RE: BLE Advertisement Simulator Tools

Roger Clark — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 21:19:10 GMT

Thanks.

Thats probably the cheapest nRF51 board I have seen.

I have some of the larger "Wireless-Tag" boards, which are basically the same, but break out more pins to the edge of the board, and I think the bigger board is more expensive as it comes preflashed with some sort if UART software which I erase and overwrite.

I have some QFAC boards , from another supplier, which are a similar size to that one. But I think I paid somewhere around $7.50 for them ( as I think they have the 32 khz external crystal)

If you really need QFAC I can find out how much they were, but I will need to contact the factory in China as they dont advertise all their products or their price, anywhere on the web

RE: BLE Advertisement Simulator Tools

Wojtek — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 14:06:04 GMT

Yes Roger - for precision timing applications they are not so good. but for beacon purpose they seems to be ok. I bought some of them here. It is QFAA, sadly :/ Cannot find QFAC anywhere.

RE: BLE Advertisement Simulator Tools

Roger Clark — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 19:46:35 GMT

Wojtek

Can you post a link to your supplier of those modules at that price.

I have some of them, but they cost 2 or 3 times as much as you paid.

BTW. not that it matters for this application, but they dont have the 32khz crystal, so some code changes may need to be made to the beacon example to use them.

RE: BLE Advertisement Simulator Tools

eBLE — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 14:48:14 GMT

This sounds like the solution we planned for as well. Advertise at 20ms and have a few hundred devices to simulate a BLE environment.

RE: BLE Advertisement Simulator Tools

Wojtek — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 11:48:06 GMT

Right, not with battery holder. There are extremely cheap WT51822-S4AT modules, but soldering battery holder would be necessary for them. They work just fine for me though.

RE: BLE Advertisement Simulator Tools

endnode — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 11:39:46 GMT

I'm afraid you won't get "beacon" like board with battery power circuit and holder below 10 USD (at this quantity) but still overall cost is unbeatable with other RF equipment.

RE: BLE Advertisement Simulator Tools

Wojtek — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 10:45:01 GMT

You can buy nRF51 modules as cheap as about 2.7$ (ex. on aliexpress or ebay). So, it is cost about 270$ to buy 100 modules + cost of batteries/power supply + programming them. It will be cheaper and more natural than simulated tool.

RE: BLE Advertisement Simulator Tools

endnode — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 09:44:16 GMT

I totally agree. There is question if to put more effort into custom FW development (probably starting from DTM and "radio test" examples in the SDK - it is also question of skills indeed;) which could emulate dozens or even hundreds of advertisers on single nRF5x board or if to go with just small modification of generic beacon/advertiser demo app on top of standard BLE stack and then you need to buy, flash and configure probably 10-100 such boards to get to high load of 1 adv. packet per 1ms or more. Either way it will be always much cheaper then other "professional" solutions... and from my real experience I can say it works and it is worth the time and funds saving (I used 10 nRF51 boards in maximum).

RE: BLE Advertisement Simulator Tools

Roger Clark — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 09:32:06 GMT

Thanks Jan

My vote would be for a load of nRF51822 boards.

I suspect to buy a professional 2.4Ghz synthesiser you would need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to replicate what you can do with 50 real boards.

RE: BLE Advertisement Simulator Tools

endnode — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 08:15:13 GMT

Hi eBLE and Roger,

I was using several (20) nRF51 based off-the-shelf beacons (either Nordic's beacon kit or other Chinese brands from Aliexpress and similar eshops) with slightly customized BLE FW. With that you could run e.g. 20ms ADV interval simulating 5 beacons with 100ms interval (altering both ADV_IND data and MAC address). This gives you battery of 20x5=100 beacons with 100ms interval. Definitely not 500 but still it gives you "traffic" with ~1 ADV_IND packet per 1ms in average. Good test for collisions and Rx resolution on scanner (FYI there is almost 0% packet loss in this scenario when you use nRF51/52 as scanner, you would need to go to several hundreds of beacons at 100ms interval or lower the interval to 50/20ms to get some significant collision rate).

So n the nutshell with pretty low investment (1 nRF51 beacon can start at 10~15USD) and some FW effort you can simulate pretty interesting load of traffic on BLE ADV channels 37/38/39. Other options would be to develop some BLE FW without SD which fires packets directly through radio peripheral (and so it could go down below 1ms timing resolution between Tx packets so effectively simulate 100~200 of broadcasters with 100ms interval) or to purchase some utterly expensive 2.4GHz network analyzers/synthesizers/test boxes which typically cost thousands or rather dozens of thousand USD.

Cheers Jan

RE: BLE Advertisement Simulator Tools

Roger Clark — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 02:11:20 GMT

I can see some technical limitations to "hundreds", as the minimum time to send an advertisement and go back to sleep with the beacon example is around 5mS (I got this data by running the SDK 12.2.0 beacon example and looking at the power usage using the Power Profiler Kit ( as I just happen to be looking at this on my own project)

As the beacon has an advertising period of 100mS, the max number of beacons you could simulate by setting the advertising period to zero (0) would be around 20.

In addition, you'd need to change the Mac and other data in between each transmission, which would slow things down further.

So I think its going to be impractical for you to simulate a large number of beacons in this way

In addition to that, BLE uses frequency hopping and you could not truly simulate multiple beacons transmitting simultaneously on multiple channels with just one device.

I guess, technically, it may be possible to build or buy a Software Defined Radio (SDR) transmitter which could simulate this, but I think that would be an extremely specialist piece of equipment.