How to scan Bluetooth 5 extended advertising from nRF52840 with Pixel 3a?

[manumonti]

Hi,

After developing two application, one for emitting extended advertising and other one for scanning this kind of advertising on nRF52840 DK (Github repository here: MOTAM-Scanner), the next step is to scan extended advertisements from an Android smartphone.

To achieve this, I decided to use Pixel 3a, that supports extended advertising according to the nRF Connect app:

Here is the application I developed for start advertising, although in this case, taking into account that the Pixel 3a doesn't support PHY_CODED, I changed this for PHY_1MBPS:

Intelligent Traffic Light Github Repository

Currently, this project uses:

• nRF5 SDK version 15.3.0

• S140 SoftDevice v6.1.1 API

Since nRF Connect Android app doesn't support extended advertising scanner, I used this example scanner from Android's Github: Android Connectivity-samples Github. I modified this application in order to see all the advertisements, but I can't see the ones that come from my nRF52840.

So, my first question is:

Do you know any Android application for scanning extended advertisements?

And if you don't know...

How can I scan the content of Bluetooth 5 extended advertisements from Android?

Thank you.

[ovrebekk]

Hi Manuel

To scan for extended advertise packets it is necessary call settings.setLegacy(false) when setting up your scan settings. We have an example of this in the nRF Toolbox source code:

https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/Android-nRF-Toolbox/blob/08b67a28c9ab5c0dbc49be619c27209e2f955e30/app/src/main/java/no/nordicsemi/android/nrftoolbox/scanner/ScannerFragment.java#L241

The ScanSettings class also has a function called setPhy, allowing you to decide which phy should be used for scanning. You can see the implementation of this function here:

https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/Android-Scanner-Compat-Library/blob/8f4907ed1b49439724e4c96a697ef0919289e16b/scanner/src/main/java/no/nordicsemi/android/support/v18/scanner/ScanSettings.java#L494

Best regards
Torbjørn

[manumonti]

Thank you, ovrebekk.

We are working on it.