Should I see iPhone 4S in Master Control Panel?

[Erland Lewin]

I have the nRF51822 development kit (with the new hardware revision QFAA or something), and I am using the Master Control Panel with the new 0.9 firmware for the dongle.

When I run the Master Control Panel device discovery, and place my iPhone 4S with bluetooth enabled and iOS 7 next to the dongle, I don't get anything in the "Discovered Devices" list. Should I be seeing my iPhone?

Thanks!

Erland

[Ole Morten]

Master Control Panel will show any Peripheral that sends Bluetooth low energy advertisement packets. The iPhone will not do this by default, but it has APIs that allows an app to start such advertisement. This is exposed through CBPeripheralManager.

If you just want to do a quick test you can use the LightBlue app to make the iOS device appear as a Peripheral, through its "Profile" menu, where you can select a Peripheral to simulate.

Edit: To make an nRF51822 device appear in the Bluetooth settings menu of an iOS device, due to supporting ANCS, you can use the following code snippets:

#define BLE_ANCS_SERVICE_UUID_BASE             {0xD0, 0x00, 0x2D, 0x12, 0x1E, 0x4B, 0x0F, 0xA4, 0x99, 0x4E, 0xCE, 0xB5, 0, 0, 0x05, 0x79}
#define BLE_ANCS_SERVICE_UUID                  0xF431
...
err_code = sd_ble_uuid_vs_add(&service_base_uuid, &p_ancs->uuid_types.service);
...

and then in advertising_init:

    ...
    ble_advdata_t scanrsp;
    
    ble_uuid_t solicited_uuids[] = {
        {BLE_ANCS_SERVICE_UUID, m_ancs_c.uuid_types.service},
    };

    memset(&scanrsp, 0, sizeof(scanrsp));
    scanrsp.uuids_solicited.p_uuids  = solicited_uuids;
    scanrsp.uuids_solicited.uuid_cnt = sizeof(solicited_uuids) / sizeof(solicited_uuids[0]);
    
    err_code = ble_advdata_set(&advdata, &scanrsp);

    ...

[Erland Lewin]

Thanks!

I had expected the Apple Notification Center Service (ANCS) to be advertised, but from the following StackExchange answer I understand that I need to run an app that starts advertising the ANCS:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19118699/ios-7-ancs-discovering-the-primary-ancs-service-uuid

If there are any apps in Apple's App Store which advertise the ANCS, I'd appreciate the pointer, to be able to start testing.

[Ole Morten]

The app doesn't have to explicitly do anything about the ANCS service, it's sufficient for it to start advertising. LightBlue is therefore sufficient.

However, please also note that the ANCS service is available even when the iPhone is a Central and not a Peripheral. Please take a look at this question, which explains the different roles in play when doing BLE: https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/index.php/what-is-a-client-and-server-in-ble