Help:breaks in slave node advertising

[frank zhang]

Hi All,

I need the slave node(S110) send advertising continuously and monitored by master node, so I set the advertising parameters as:

adv_params.type        = BLE_GAP_ADV_TYPE_ADV_NONCONN_IND;
adv_params.p_peer_addr = NULL;
adv_params.fp          = BLE_GAP_ADV_FP_ANY;
adv_params.interval    = 800;
adv_params.timeout     = 0;

The code compiled and run ok on the slave node. Then I modified the S120 code(ble_app_hrs_c) for the master node and monitor the advertising with it, the UART output information shows there are breaks in advertising, here is a sample log: ..... [2014:08:07:16:26:27]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-47 [2014:08:07:16:26:28]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-44 [2014:08:07:16:26:28]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-42 [2014:08:07:16:26:34]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-47 [2014:08:07:16:26:34]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-44 [2014:08:07:16:26:35]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-42 [2014:08:07:16:26:35]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-47 [2014:08:07:16:26:36]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-43 [2014:08:07:16:26:36]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-42 [2014:08:07:16:26:37]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-47 [2014:08:07:16:26:37]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-44 [2014:08:07:16:26:38]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-42 [2014:08:07:16:26:38]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-46 [2014:08:07:16:26:39]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-43 [2014:08:07:16:26:43]MAC:6F26E1DD94D8,RSSI:-47 .......

The logs shows the advertising stopped at 2014:08:07:16:26:28, and it started again at 2014:08:07:16:26:34, then it stopped at 2014:08:07:16:26:39 and started again at 2014:08:07:16:26:43. The full log shows the advertising is always in ON 5~6 secons and OFF 5~6 seconds state.

What I want is the slave node can send advertising twice a second,and the master node can know the slave node is alive with the advertising. For the problem, It's hard for me to check it's from slave node's advertising or the master node's listening. Could anybody give a suggestion on how to make it working? Thanks!

[John]

The easiest way to tell if your problem is with your advertiser or your central device is to capture the behavior in a sniffer. Nordic provides an easy way to convert your eval or dev kit into a sniffer. See here:

Sniffer download

[frank zhang]

I got a PCA10000 and successfully monitored the slave node with wireshark, the log shows there are no breaks in slave node's advertising, the problem should be at S120 side. I am curious why the master node can't get the advertising from one slave node continuously, when the problem occurs, the master node's RF is active as it can receive advertising from other nodes at the same time.