Getting non-advertising packets with nRF Sniffer?

RE: Getting non-advertising packets with nRF Sniffer?

mwmccabe — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 14:11:54 GMT

Yes, this was resolved. Sometimes (as endnonde mentioned in his original post) the packets won't be detected beyond the CONNECT_REQ, which happened the first time I tried it (could also have been due to having multiple peripherals with similar names and the one I selected was grabbed by a central when I was selecting it, which also makes the peripheral undetectable unless already selected.) Tried again, and it was working fine.

RE: Getting non-advertising packets with nRF Sniffer?

David Edwin — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 09:43:02 GMT

@mwmccabe Is this issue fixed. If the issue is still not fixed, please add a comment. This type of issue usually points to a segger jlink issue, you need to have segger jlink 6.16c for the nRF sniffer v2-beta1. Follow the troubleshooting guide to downgrade the segger jlink emulator firmware on the board.

RE: Getting non-advertising packets with nRF Sniffer?

endnode — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 17:52:43 GMT

Well debugging as usual:

Are you running the latest sniffer software, firmware and Wireshark? What nRF5x DK version you use to host sniffer FW?
Can you make it work withbother BLE devices as test set-up (whih you are sure run BT LE 4.0 or 4.1)?
If nothing helps can you attach few PCAP capture files and at leat one screenshot?

Using encrypted link shouldn't matter (but you might be missing PDU decoding) but using anonymous MAC might be a problem (never tried it).

RE: Getting non-advertising packets with nRF Sniffer?

mwmccabe — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 16:27:53 GMT

I select the device but there are no packets being detected. I don't believe there is a passkey or a OOB. What few packets are detected aren't what I would expect, and are from the advertising channels... Could it be something with the way our BT protocol was structured?

RE: Getting non-advertising packets with nRF Sniffer?

MartinBL — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 16:01:12 GMT

Have you seen the user guide? infocenter.nordicsemi.com/.../sniffer_intro.html

It should be described there.

RE: Getting non-advertising packets with nRF Sniffer?

mwmccabe — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 15:52:55 GMT

Thank you for the reply. I've found a CONNECT_REQ packet, but how can I follow the connection?

RE: Getting non-advertising packets with nRF Sniffer?

endnode — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 15:33:00 GMT

nRF Sniffer can indeed follow the connection so what it is missing is probably CONNECT_REQ packet. Sometimes it happens because nRF Sniffer has only single radio on nRF5x DK board and while it tries to jump over all 3 channels to catch the CONNECT_REQ it cannot do magic. Also make sure that sniffer is in good position because again PCB antenna on nRF5x DK boards doesn't have properties of some more powerful and more expensive RF analyzers...