About the litepoint bluetooth advanced

[william_wu_A]

Hi Nordic team

I have a question about Litepoint bluetooth advanced nRF5x OTA Testing.

According to the White Paper v1.0, by using the heart rate  app, it is easy to evaluate the bluetooth performance.

And what if I do not have the Litepoint measurement equipment , but I want to do the same measurement?

Or, any alternative way can reach it?

[bjorn-spockeli]

Hi William, 

the Litepoint equipment(HW and SW)  performs transmitter power, transmitter quality, and receiver sensitivity measurements on the advertisment packages sent by a BLE device, in our case a NRF52 DK flashed with the heart rate example from our SDK. These types of measurements require dedicated measurement equipment and I am not aware of any other solutions that offer the same testing capabilities in one package. 

If you want a simpler test production test setup then I would advise you to take a look at our Setting up production test using DTM Application note.

Best regards

Bjørn 

[william_wu_A]

Hi Bjørn 

Thanks for your clear explanation. More further question if you do not mind. When the receiver sensitivity is operating, the packet error rate can be determined by the device itself  or have to be calculate by me ?  

Many thanks

[bjorn-spockeli]

The nRF5x ICs and the S13x SoftDevices does not provide any quality data on a connection or on the advertisment packets. Hence you will have to calculate this yourself, by counting the number of packets received and compare that number against the number of packets that was sent.  You could set up one DK to advertise for a given amount of time, e.g. 10 seconds with an advertisement interval of 100ms and only advertise on one advertisement channel. Then set up another DK to scan continuously on the same channel. You should then receive 10*10 advertisement packets if the PER is 0.

[william_wu_A]

So as you recommend, it is better to measure the sensitivity under the DTM mode than the normal operate like Litepoint  bluetooth advanced setting, right?

[bjorn-spockeli]

I would say that if your final product is fully enclosed, e.g. water-proof housing etc, so that it cannot be opened to access uart/test pins during production testing, then I would recommend the Litepoint OTA solution. 

However, if your product is not fully enclosed or you have access to uart/test pins, then I would recommend going for the standard DTM apporach.