A lot off missing PDUs with Sniffer 3

[Torsten Robitzki]

Hello,

first of all let me thank you for providing the nRF Sniffer, which is a great and very helpful tool! I use it a lot and I'm well are that one would have to pay a lot of money for tools like this.

Currently, I'm working for a client who needs the very much bandwidth and so we try to use 2M PHY, DLE and L2CAP to create a fast data stream. I would like to verify that connection intervals are utilized as much as I think they should be, but: With the version 3.0 of the Sniffer, I get only a fraction of the PDUs that are flowing between the nRF52 and an iPhone. (see attachment)

Is there anything, that I could do to improve my setup (Mac Catalina, PCA100056 Eval Board placed between target hardware and iPhone)? Could it be, that the USB connection between the eval board and my PC is the limiting factor? Anyone aware of a sniffer that supports the full BLE protocol that costs less than 10k€/$?

best regards,

Torsten

missing_packages.pcapng

[Kenneth]

For 2M PHY, DLE and L2CAP I can confirm that the sniffer is not able to send all the data from the chip fast enough over the USB (UART actually). 

For your budget you may check out if Frontline or Ellisys have something to offer, I have good experience with both.

Best regards,
Kenneth

[Torsten Robitzki]

Hi Kenneth,

thanks for the response! Well Frontline and Ellisys Sniffer cost 10k to 20k€ which is not very much, if you share the device in a company with 10 developers but it is too much for a one man company like mine.

The dilemma is: If I would start to develop a product similar to the sniffer that Nordic is offering, I could probably offer a product in the range of 1000-2000€ that would be able to cover all of the BLE 5.1 features. But: as soon as Nordic comes with version 4.0 of the current sniffer and closed the existing gap, all the month of developing such a "small price" sniffer would be void.

Would be super cool, if Nordic could / would open source their Sniffer. I would be happy to contribute ;-)

best regards,

Torsten

[Torsten Robitzki]

For those of us, that are in need to inspect BLE connections with higher bandwidth, but are not capable to but 10k on the table, here is a very interesting open source project, similar to the nRF Sniffer: github.com/.../Sniffle