Physical layer statistics with SoftDevice

[Meea]

Hi!

I'd like to collect statistics from BLE physical layer, namely about errors that have occurred in receiving packets on a BLE advertisement channel. I see from custom radio examples (and MyNewt source) that this could be done by simply checking CRCSTATUS. However, I naturally want to use SoftDevice instead of implementing my own BLE stack. :) Is there any simple way to capture such information from radio stack when using SoftDevice?

I presume that if I'm not able to do this with SoftDevice, I can always just use the radio directly, as the on-air packet parsing is done at hardware-level. I would get the same CRC without implementing BLE at all, right? Moreover, it is not that difficult to parse BLE advertisements. ;)

Regards
Meea

[bjorn-spockeli]

Hi Meea,

you're assumption is correct, i.e. you will not be able to get this data while the SoftDevice is active, since it will block the RADIO peripheral and there is no public sd_ API to get this data from the SoftDevice. That said, we're looking into adding this feature to our SoftDevices, but I cannot give ETA or you any guarantee that it will be implemented for that matter

Yes, you'll have to use the RADIO peripheral directly and parse the advertisement packets yourself.

Best regards

Bjørn