central_usb example on Thingy:91 or nRF9160-DK board

[bojan]

Hello guys,

We are developing our IoT prototype with Thingy:91 board using v1.2.0 tag. 

One of the things we need to to is as follows:

• Scan the BLE area looking for BLE beacon with the fixed UUID
• Read data advertised by BLE beacon
• Transfer the data from nRF52840 to nRF9160 on the Thingy:91 board

It was suggested to us that central_uart example can be a good starting point for us to see how to scan BLE area and do filtering by UUID. We tried the example on both Thingy:91 and nRF9160-DK boards and here is what we get:

00> *** Booting Zephyr OS build v2.1.99-ncs1  ***
00> Starting Bluetooth Central UART example
00> E: No HCI driver registered
00> Bluetooth init failed (err -19)

When we try the code on nRF52840-DK, however, we were able to successfully start BLE scanning process.

How can we run the sample on Thingy:91/nRF9160-DK boards?

Is there any better or more suitable example for Thingy:91 that will show us how to do BLE scan (filering by UUID) and read data advertised by BLE beacon?

Thanks in advance for your time and efforts.

Sincerely,

Bojan.

[Sigurd]

Hi,

I was not able to reproduce this. 

I assume that you are not connecting to the beacons. The UUID filtering in central_uart uses the Scanning module, and is mainly for filtering in context of connecting to devices. If you want to parse the advertising data, they you can register your own “parsing function“ with bt_le_scan_cb_register(), and then parse the data with bt_data_parse(). I recommend sticking with the architecture in the lte_ble_gateway example with the split host/controller. Then modify lte_ble_gateway/src/ble.c according to your needs.

bojan said:

read data advertised by BLE beacon?

What data are using with the beacon ? What data do want to read? manufacturer data ? 

Are you using any special beacon format? i.e. iBeacon / eddystone ?