PC ble central application storing and using bonding information to same peripheral

[Hamed Rafi]

Hi,

I am implementing a PC application connecting with nRF52840 dongle as central (s140). I am bonding with a BLE peripheral device following this sequence diagram.
Application goes through the following states:

1. BLE_GAP_EVT_ADV_REPORT         ---> sd_ble_gap_connect()
2. BLE_GAP_EVT_CONNECTED          ---> sd_ble_gap_authenticate()
3. BLE_GAP_EVT_SEC_PARAMS_REQUEST ---> sd_ble_gap_sec_params_reply(success)
4. BLE_GAP_EVT_CONN_SEC_UPDATE
5. BLE_GAP_EVT_AUTH_STATUS        ---> NRF_SUCCESS

As I understand, soft device will not store bonding info in dongle (PC side) and I have to do that manually in some way. Hence before storing bonding information and on a second attempt to connect to the same peripheral, the central PC application jumps directly to BLE_GAP_EVT_AUTH_STATUS with status being 0x85.

1. BLE_GAP_EVT_ADV_REPORT         ---> sd_ble_gap_connect()
2. BLE_GAP_EVT_CONNECTED          ---> sd_ble_gap_authenticate()
3. BLE_GAP_EVT_AUTH_STATUS        ---> BLE_GAP_SEC_STATUS_PAIRING_NOT_SUPP

My questions are:

1. How should I store the bonding info? On PC or nRF52 flash memory?
2. How can I use the stored bonding info on next connection to the same peripheral? Is there a function that receives pointers to key_set?

Thanks!

Kind regards,
Hamed

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi Hamed,

1. When using the pc-ble-driver, this provides you with the SoftDevice API in a serialized way. So everything not implemented by SoftDevice should be implemented on the PC side, not the nRF. This includes handling and storing of bonds.

2. We do not provide bond management for the pc-ble-driver, but you can refer to how it is done in the Peer manager that runs on the nRF target (for non-serialized applications). You should also refer to the SoftDevice documentation for how to do pairing, starting with the Central Security Procedures Message Sequence Charts.