Connection to a peripheral with a specific name

[Andrea]

Hi

I am developing an application where nrf52 acts as a BLE central

Specifications requires that this node should connect to a peripheral with a specified name, obviously if available. Is it necessary to start a ble scan to retrieve mac address of the peripheral? Or is there a more efficient way to do this?

Thanks in advance

[Susheel Nuguru]

Hi Andrea,

The scanner can get the name from advertising report (If the advertiser is sending its device name in the report and/or scan response). Please look into this thread to see how you can do it. 

If the scanner knows the device address in advance, then it can use whitelisting to scan and connect only to the known device address. You can know about it in this thread.

 

 

[kris.s]

Hi Aryan,

I have a similar application as the user above.  However, in the example you provide they use the whitelist for advertising.  We are already using our whitelist to manage bonded connections, and according to the updated Softdevice spec it can't be used for both simultaneously.  Our central maintains a connection with various mobile devices while simultaneously scanning for advertising data from our separate beacon-like devices (also NRF52-based) which it filters for by mac address (no direct connection, adv only).

We're finding that without a whitelist filtering the scan responses are overloading the softdevice in our test environment resulting in missed scan response packets, so the whitelist seems like a requirement here.  With the older SDK we were able to pass a pointer to our own whitelist for scan response filtering but that appears to no longer be an option.

Appreciate any suggestions or ideas you may have, Thank you