BLE 4.2 sniffer

[lbehhhh]

I am hoping to get solid verification that nordic offers a solution for sniffing BLE 4.2 packets.

The application I need to sniff is maxing out the MTU (250B payload) so I need support for long packets.

The blogs and googling haven't provided me with a solid answer.

Thanks

[Hung Bui]

At this moment our answer is no, we do not have plans to add this support. However it may change in the coming months.

[lbehhhh]

So my end goal is to get a nRF52840 DK working as a BLE 4.2 sniffer.

This link (devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../) suggests its possible, and this link(devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../) suggests that you support longer packets than 23B, but how long?

I am in middle of trying to get the Eclipse IDE with GCC toolchain working and dont want to waste my time with this if you can tell me at the end of the day I wont be able to sniff BLE packets with PDU up to 250B.

Thanks for your help

[RK]

The recent softdevices support long packets, so you can write BLE code which uses long packets. The sniffer code which Nordic provides for free however does not support long packets and according to the reply above there are no plans to update it at present. So you can write code which uses long packets, if you have a 3rd party sniffer which supports them you can sniff them, however you can't use the nordic BLE sniffer at this point to sniff long packets.

The softdevice support for long packets is entirely independent from the Nordic sniffer binary, you can't use the softdevice as a sniffer, they aren't the same thing.

[lbehhhh]

Perhaps I didnt make myself clear. I realize the softdevice is not a sniffer.

What I wanted to know is more about the links I provided in the above comment. They suggest that 1) you can sniff packets longer than 23B (but how long? Cant find that anywhere) and 2) if the sniffer binary is even compatible with nRF52 family of devices.

My problem here really is finding a sniffer for BLE 4.2 that utilizes the long packets. If anyone has suggestion on what to use that would be great. Using the nRF52 is just a science project since I have a board laying around not being used right now and would have been convenient.

Any help is appreciated.

[Wojtek]

In here Einar states that S132 v2 supports packets longer than >23, not the Sniffer. Sniffer does not support packets >23b

[lbehhhh]

Ok thanks for clarifying that for me.
Again if anyone has suggestions on a sniffer they have used for the purposes of BLE 4.2 and long data packets please let me know.