How to tell a peripheral to switch to central mode and connect to another specific peripheral?

[Andy]

Hello,

I'm not posting this as a problem, but rather to get some suggestions and ideas about this feature. I have a device based on the NRF52832. It is meant to work as a peripheral, but now I want to extend its features by connecting to other peripherals, for example, a BLE GPS receiver to get GPS data.

My device does not have a screen or any buttons, but I have a working app that connects to my peripheral. I would like to somehow choose in the app the peripheral I want my device to connect to.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to go about this. My initial idea is that the app should scan for devices, then the user would choose one and the app would tell the device to enable central mode and to start scanning for the chosen device. What would be a good way to identify the same device in both the app and the device?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

[awneil]

Andy said:

What would be a good way to identify the same device in both the app and the device?

MAC address?

[Andy]

Can I have access to that information without actually connecting to the device? Imagine a situation where I choose one device out of 50 in range. Can I determine the MAC address of a device just by scanning the advertisement packets?

[Andy]

Moreover, do iOS and Android have access to this information? I believe iOS restricts access to the MAC address but I'm not 100% sure about this.

[awneil]

Android gives it; iOS doesn't.

If you had your nRF do the scanning, it would see it - and could pass it on to the app ...

[Andy]

So I could scan all devices with the nRF, pass the MAC addresses to the phone and let the user choose one?