nrf sniffer not picking up any packets

[micallef25]

Hello,

I am using the nrf sniffer from adafruit to pick up ble packets from my NRF52. Everything has been working fine for the past 3-4 months. Yesterday I wanted to test a new program I had written that allows the user to input from putty terminal through UARTE how many ble packets/sec they would like to send, test duration and TxPower of the radio. After flashing the code and inputting some basic settings (2 packs/sec, for 2 seconds) My sniffer stopped working. I had a friend of mine try the code out on their setup that was working and it too caused for the sniffer to stop working.

I know I am transmitting messages because I have programmed another NRf52 to blink an LED everytime it receives a BLE packet with a specific advertising address. I have tried several different transmission test for example 4 packets/sec for 4 seconds and I see my receiver blink 16 times as expected.

the only thing I can think of is that since I am using a COM port for my sniffer and a COM port for the beefy ftdi breakout (communication from putty -> Tx NRF52) somehow this may have reprogrammed/damaged/ interfered or did something strange to the sniffer.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

I have attached the code if you would like to take a look.

Eric Micallef

[endnode]

Okey, so if the board with BLE FW seems to be working then probably Sniffer stopped. Unfortunately I've seen such things. Nordic Sniffer is great but it's still only $40 board with free-of-charge FW so you cannot expect extensive support and stability. On some systems of my friends it doesn't work at all, on some they need to unplug it after every session to be able to start new one, on some machines it works until some update/upgrade and then stops... hard to say what's wrong in your case. Usual debugging of windows application is restarting machine, reinstalling SW packages one by one, reinstalling the USB peripheral (Sniffer FW on nRF51 Dk or Dongle) etc.