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Sniffer on OSX - revisited

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!

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  • Thanks for working on this, David Edwin!

    I've copied the contents of your new code into the ...\extcap folder
    no change in visibility of the interface in WireShark.

    I ran through the "Troubleshooting" steps in nRF_Sniffer_User_Guide_v2.1.
    All steps gave appropriate success results, except "screen port 460800" (same blank, unresponsive screen) and WireShark - with no evidence of the interface.

    I'm still open for a screen-share - 24/7.

    Thanks again!

    Dave

  • Can you try the screen option on all the the DKs that you have, I see that a PCA10031 and a PCA10040 were mentioned.

  • OK.  I'll try that tomorrow (Tuesday US Central time) with:
    Python 2.7.14
    pyserial (3.2.1)
    - SEGGER J-Link Commander V6.16c (Compiled Jun 16 2017 18:19:39)
       DLL version V6.16c, compiled Jun 16 2017 18:19:20
    - WireShark Mac OS 
    Version 2.4.5

    In separate sessions, I'll use each device (nRF dongle-PCA10031 and DK-PCA10040) and flash them using the appropriate parameters in JLINKEXE to "erase..." as in the Sniffer 2.1 User Guide.

    Then in OSX Terminal, I'll run "screen <port> 460800" 
    and report the results.

    Have I got it?

    Thanks

     

  • OK, I've run the above with no luck on either board.

    I'm wondering where to go next.

    I've been through the steps many times.

    Are others experiencing this problem?
    Is so, what is your environment?

  • 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

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