Does a NRF51822 Beacon recognize that it is in range of a smartphone?

[vtru]

Hello,

my idea is to turn on a GPIO-Pin of the NRF51822-Beacon-Kit when my smartphone found the beacon. Of course if the smartphone is out of range or far away the pin should turn off again. So my question is: Does the Beacon recognize in any way, that it is in seen by a smartphone? Or do I have to start a "real" BLE conversation from the phone to the beacon when the beacon is in range?

Thank you for your help!

[Stefan Birnir Sverrisson]

Hi

A beacon device is a non-connectable broadcasting device, which means it is constantly in advertising mode and will not receive any packets. The non-connectable broadcasting mode is defined with

m_adv_params.type        = BLE_GAP_ADV_TYPE_ADV_NONCONN_IND;

in advertising_init() function. An idea is to change this to be a scannable advertising:

m_adv_params.type        = BLE_GAP_ADV_TYPE_ADV_SCAN_IND;

which will allow the device to listen for scan requests from a central. That way, you could enable RSSI at the same time to detect the signal strength from the central device.

Update 14.1.2014 I must correct myself. For current S110 softdevice version (S110 v7.1.0) the device must be connected in order for the application to receive RSSI event from the softdevice.