My devices should be able to "see" each other and at the same time they should be able to extract some information from a received Advertising packet. After reading about BLE I am looking for the chip which could support the following combined state (according to the BLE that is possible):
Nonconnectable advertising Passive scanning
Is that (the combined state) supported by any Nordic chips?
In case that is not supported - what alternative setup/chips you could suggest?
So far I have been playing with another manufacturer's BLE chip but it turned out that it can be (at any given moment of time) only in one of the modes above, therefore, to achieve my goal (several devices should exchange small peace of information with each other) with that chip I would need to periodically (pretty often actually - around 1 second or even faster) trigger the device between those 2 modes which would probably work but at the same time I have at least couple of concerns with this approach: a) The chip's processor would need to do more work (by pretty often using the Host to reprogram the Controller) comparing to what it would do if that standard BLE combined mode was supported, as a result a battery life will be decreased, which seems like kind of opposite thing than the purpose of BLE - consume as small amount of energy as possible. b) There could be a possibility that more than 1 device (let's say a group of devices) will always listen/advertise (if I switch those modes manually) at the same time so they will not have an opportunity to detect each other or a time window for that opportunity would be small. This could probably be solved by rescheduling a timer with some kind of random value to avoid those "blind time frames" but this approach doesn't seem like could completely eliminate "blind time frames".
So, would be good to know if Nordic has a chip which solves this on low (Controller?) level.
