Sniffer on OSX - revisited

Question

It looks like the last discussion of Sniffer on Devzone was 2-3 yrs ago. 
 I’ve ordered the nRF Dongle and will download the Windows-based nRF Sniffer app. 
 i can run this with WireShark on a Windows VM on my Mac, though I would like a Mac OSX option. 
 - Any news on that front? 
 - Any way the Bluetooth hardware built into the MacBook could serve a Mac Sniffer app? 
 
 thanks!

Richard · Accepted Answer

I was having issues with Wireshark not showing the extcap interface in it's UI on Mac OS X 10.13.5, even though the files were in the correct location, inside the .app /Applications/Wireshark.app/Contents/MacOS/extcap/ 
 
 While trying to debug the issue, i decided to run wireshark directly from my shell to see any possible output via /Applications/Wireshark.app/Contents/MacOS/Wireshark 
 Turns out, this was enough to get nrf_sniffer.py to load, so if you've been having trouble getting it to load, it might be worth running the executable directly from Terminal.app 
 I suspect it has something to do with environment variables that Wireshark inherits from the shell, but haven't debugged further. 
 
 EDIT: Turns out, the best way to fix this so regular app launches work was to change the shebang at the top of nrf_sniffer.py to point directly to your local python2 instance. For me, this was #!/usr/local/bin/python2

David Edwin · Answer

OS X 10.11.6 Wireshark : 2.4.1 python 2.7.10 pyserial 3.2.1 nRF Sniffer v2 Beta 1 
 PCA10040 
 Segger jlink 6.16c on the PC Segger jlink 6.16c on jlink emulator on the nRF5x board. (use the "Verify that Jlink emulator firmware is correct version" section in the nRF Sniffer user guide v2.1) 
 Works for me. 
 Looks like the pyserial is different (as I am not using the latest 3.4 version) 
 Edit: Confirmed on one user that using the pyserial 3.2.1 for OS X definitely fixes the issue seen on OS X. 
 Edit: 
 Added a patched Sniffer python release that may improve the issue seen with the UART. Try this let me know if this improves things. 
 2084.nrf_sniffer_2.0.0-beta-1_a00e98c_26Apr18_out.zip 
 Edit: 
 Can you try the OS X Sniffer for BTLE which uses the native serial driver for OS X ? This should give us some more clues on the issue, for those who still seeing issues on OS X.

Sniffer on OSX - revisited

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