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

[RK]

My recollection is it puts a handy header in yellow telling you DLT157 isn't registered and helpfully suggesting you go to Preferences->Protocols->DLT_USER. Which the guy in this thread followed, worked out the only hard bit, that the decoder is called 'nordic_ble' and .. due to wireshark integrating the decoder 2 years ago, it works. And you all the new BLE stuff, and a ton of bug fixes.

he also gives some handy tips in there for capturing from a pipe which won't work because the OSX pipes aren't in the same place, I believe it's on-screen somewhere in the app and you could probably set it up for a live capture, but I can't imagine it's fun.

[David Edwin]

We do have support for Wireshark 2.4.x at this point with one manual change needed to attach the DLT 157 to "nordic_ble". Yes, 4.2 is a gap.

Can you comment on which 4.2 features that you are looking at ? some are fairly easy to address but others are a bit harder.

[endnode]

Well ideally Nordic sniffer should be able to follow connection of two Nordic nRF52840 PDKs using whatever config you have in throughput demo (PDU extension, ATT MTU extension, connection interval extension, long range and 2MBps air speeds, extended broadcasting once it is supported by your stack etc.) I totally understand that it's extensive work and that some features might be easier to do then others. I guess it's more strategic decision if Nordic invests to nRF sniffer at all (because correct me if I'm wrong but there was really minimal effort put into it in last 3 years, it hardly changed since 2014). It's unbelievably useful tool for all BLE developers on the budget today and as more and more will migrate to new 4.2/5.0 features it has potential to be either forgotten in few years or conquer this space;) It's up to you guys.

[David Edwin]

As answered by Hung the answer remains "no to 4.2 support at this point" but we are trying hard to make that a yes. I understand and share your frustration. We are now staffed up for Wireshark support and continue to push internally to get the firmware upgrades in place.

[Phil Beeson]

At the moment I'd settle for support for 4.2 Data Length Extensions. Longer term I'd want to see support for all the 5.0 features endnode asks for. Put simply, if you add a feature to the SD, then I want to be able to see the OTA data with the sniffer so that if something is going wrong, I have a chance of understanding it. It is encouraging to hear that there is an internal push to make this happen. We'll all thank you for it when it does!