Do mass-produced Beacons have unique mac-address?

[Chao Ming]

I am going to mass-produce beacons with built-in ble uart app sample.

However, I am not sure those produced beacons will have unique mac-address.

In my view, those are programmed with the same firmware, so no way to identify them uniquely?

Please help me.

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

By default, the SDK examples use the address from FICR, which is randomly generated and (in practice) unique. So you do not need to modify the firmware in order to get unique addresses on all y our beacons. This old post is equally valid for the nRF52.

[Chao Ming]

Thanks for letting me know.
I was thinking to generate a random device name if the mac-address of all produced beacons with the same frimware will not unique. 

It will save my work a lot. 

Thanks.

[Chao Ming]

Oh, sorry, one more thing to ask.
The 6-byte mac-address is different in android and iOS devices for the same beacon.
Could you tell me the reason?

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

How do you see this? Can you elaborate and show screenshots?

[Chao Ming]

Please have a look at the screenshots.

[Einar Thorsrud]

You are not comparing the same things. nRF Connect for Android displays the address, but that is not available to the app from the BLE API on iOS. The data you see in the screenshot from iOS are parts of the advertisement packet payload, not the address. There is absolutely no way to obtain the address on iOS (unless the iOS Bluetooth API is updated to support it, and that would be up to Apple).

[Chao Ming]

Aha, I got it. 

Everything seems to okay now. Thanks for your help.