nRF5 SDK 15 adv_report

[mich_x]

I see that a lot of things are changed in SDK 15 about BLE. I wonder if it is because of Bluetooth5.

But, the problem I am having is that I cannot find an example that shows me the structure of adv_report and how to read it. I was referring to ble_app_uart_c in SDK 14. I understand that now Nordic tries to cover the lower level with nrf_ble_scan.c. But my application actually needs to parse the beacon data. So I am still using the APIs in SDK 14 and trying to find them in SDK 15.

Right now, I have managed to initialize the ble stack and send beacons with the right payload(this is verified by the previous device). But I don't know how to scan and get the content. I have tried to HEX_DUMP every byte got from BLE_GAP_EVT_ADV_REPORT event. But I think it only contains part of the real beacons around me.

P.S.: I notice a strange thing in the nrf_ble_scan.c. It resumes scanning after parsing the adv_report like this: Should I do this if I am not using my own implementation instead of nrf_ble_scan.c

// Resume the scanning.
    UNUSED_RETURN_VALUE(sd_ble_gap_scan_start(NULL, &p_scan_ctx->scan_buffer));

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

I recommend you refer to the ble_app_hrc_c example to see how you can use the ble_advdata_* functions to parse the advertising data. If you want to do it without any helper functions you can access the full raw advertising data from ble_gap_evt_adv_report_t::data.p_data (length is ble_gap_evt_adv_report_t::data.len) when you get the BLE_GAP_EVT_ADV_REPORT event.

[mich_x]

This is how I handle the ble_evt. I dumped all the adv_report it got but could not find the data I send by another device running SDK14. I am sure that the advertising of the SDK14 is correct.

static void ble_evt_handler(ble_evt_t const * p_ble_evt, void * p_context)
{
    ble_gap_evt_t const * p_gap_evt = &p_ble_evt->evt.gap_evt;

    switch (p_ble_evt->header.evt_id)
    {
        case BLE_GAP_EVT_ADV_REPORT:
        {
            ble_gap_evt_adv_report_t const * p_adv_report = &p_gap_evt->params.adv_report;
			NRF_LOG_DEBUG("In parse"); 
        	NRF_LOG_DEBUG("%d", p_adv_report->data.len);
        	NRF_LOG_HEXDUMP_DEBUG(p_adv_report->data.p_data, p_adv_report->data.len);
        }break; // BLE_GAP_EVT_ADV_REPORT

        default:
            break;
    }
}

This is how I initialize the scan module.

static void blend_ble_stack_init(void )
{
    ret_code_t err_code;

    err_code = nrf_sdh_enable_request();
    APP_ERROR_CHECK(err_code);

    // Configure the BLE stack using the default settings.
    // Fetch the start address of the application RAM.
    uint32_t ram_start = 0;
    err_code = nrf_sdh_ble_default_cfg_set(APP_BLE_CONN_CFG_TAG, &ram_start);
    APP_ERROR_CHECK(err_code);

    // Enable BLE stack.
    err_code = nrf_sdh_ble_enable(&ram_start);
    APP_ERROR_CHECK(err_code);

    // Register a handler for BLE events.
    NRF_SDH_BLE_OBSERVER(_blend_ble_observer, APP_BLE_OBSERVER_PRIO, ble_evt_handler, NULL);
	_blend_scan_instance.scan_buffer.p_data = _blend_scan_instance.scan_buffer_data;
	_blend_scan_instance.scan_buffer.len = NRF_BLE_SCAN_BUFFER;
}

Can you maybe check for me where I did wrong? Because this is the exact way I did in SDK14 and that was perfectly fine. I am not sure what has changed about the softdevice API during the upgrade.

[Einar Thorsrud]

I do not see any code that initiates scanning in your code snippets.

I made a simple active scanner example for SDK 15 the other day, which you can find in this post. That should do what you want out of the box, so perhaps you can start with that instead?

[mich_x]

I noticed that both your code and the examples resume scanning after handling the ble_evt. Is it required for SDK 15? Because I did not do this on SDK 14 and it seems to be ok. 

[Einar Thorsrud]

Yes, this is required in SDK 15, as it uses S132/S140 version 6. See API documentation for sd_ble_gap_scan_start() for details.