Multiple beacon advertisement

RE: Multiple beacon advertisement

endnode — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 20:19:26 GMT

Then you have clearly a problem. I don't have any new magic advice on top of these you already read and linked from this forum. My last words would be: this kind of use case is known limitation of Nordic stacks and it might get really difficult to implement it even with one GAP Peripheral role and time-slots for remaining types of adv. packets (mainly because as far as I understand it these won't get through stack so these won't be connectable). If you really want to succeed going with Zephyr or other open source stack looks more promising.

RE: Multiple beacon advertisement

Sal — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 20:16:27 GMT

My requirements are connectable beaconing to configure the interval and other characteristics. Please suggest how I can use the softdevice to achieve this. Thanks.

RE: Multiple beacon advertisement

Sigurd — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 12:36:26 GMT

Hi,

Regarding point 3, you should download the nRF Beacon for Eddystone app, and use it to configure the different Eddystone advertising frame types. Remember to put the beacon in config-mode in order to configure it.

RE: Multiple beacon advertisement

endnode — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 08:17:46 GMT

I still believe that if you want to only advertise as non-connectable beacon (of whatever format) then actually doing it without Soft Device (or other BLE stack) and just by simple app timer and directly sending packet through RADIO (there are examples of this in SDK and on GitHub) looks like the easiest thing. Messing up with the Soft Device and time-slots looks over complicated and easy to make some corner case bugs. Just my opinion.

RE: Multiple beacon advertisement

Sal — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 20:45:52 GMT

Thank you for your quick response. Let me clarify, requirement is not really to send all three frames at the some time but rather have them alternate on radio. (chosen interval between 100ms to 10000ms will be divisible by 25ms). So for example on every 25ms interval I advertise a different frame but they should not get missed or delayed by more than 25ms. Also the frames would only advertise on their own "timeslot" (ibeacon every 100ms with the 25ms offset to avoid collision with rotating eddystone, and custom frame every 1sec).

RE: Multiple beacon advertisement

endnode — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 19:30:44 GMT

This use case really isn't something what Nordic Soft Device was designed for. Have you considered using other open source variants (like Zephyr) which might have better API or you can modify their GAP and Link layers directly to alter PDUs in this way? Btw. your requirements look simple on the paper but what they technically say is "you need three independent radios - or three independent SW stacks on top of one radio and survive some potential collisions". (btw. I believe it's not accident that you cannot find any example in the SDK which would implement this, simply not obvious and easy to implement think, brings real complexity to the FW)

It might look crazy to build boards with three radio chips and 1-3 antennas but it's not if you think about it for longer time. I would still go back and challenge the requirements, if you can limit the scope from totally independent and asynchronous advertisements to somehow synchronized (and e.g with intervals which must be multiple of certain base interval) then situation changes drastically and you might be able to use Nordic stack easily according to advise from the links above.