Nordic BLE Sniffer question

[Stroker347]

I have an nRF51 based Bluefruit LE Friend device with the Nordic V3 BLE sniffer firmware installed. I am using the associated  Nordic BLE interface with Wireshark 3.2.5 (64bit) and Python 3.8.1 (32 bit) setup on two different Windows 10 64bit PCs. The LE Friend uses a Silicon Labs CP210x USB to UART Bridge driver for which I have the most recent version installed. When I first starting using this sniffer in June and July of this year it worked great, I was really impressed with it. Recently, however, when I began using it again in late Aug I found that the sniffer frequently stops logging (and the LED stops flashing) as soon as I connect to a captured BLE slave device with a BLE master device. Even the Connect Request does not get logged. When the connection is closed, and advertising resumes, logging of advertisements automatically starts again (and the LED resumes flashing). Once in a while the sniffer will capture and log the connection events. This happens on both computers that previously worked great. I believe that what they have in common, that may have caused this problem, is “2020-08 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 1909 for x64-based Systems (KB4565351)”, which was installed in early Aug. I think the problem is with the CP210x driver because I also have an nRF52 DK device that uses a JLink CDC UART Port driver and it doesn’t have this problem when using the V3 sniffer firmware. I have uninstalled the CP210x driver and reinstalled it with no improvement. I also recently updated Wireshark to version 3.2.6 on one of the computers but that did not make a difference either. I know the driver is not Nordic’s problem but I’m wondering whether you have any suggestions as to how I might improve the situation.

[haakonsh]

There's not much to be done from our side, we can't support any other board than what we develop ourselves. I suggest you get your hands on a nRF52832DK or nRF52840DK and use that as a sniffer instead. 

If there is an issue with the CP210x and windows drivers then that is a matter that Si labs and Microsoft needs to fix, as it probably affects many CP210x devices. 

[Stroker347]

Thanks,

As I said in my question I also have a Nordic nRF52 DK board and it works fine, which is why I think there's a driver problem with the other one. But I want to use the nRF52 board for development work and the nRF51 board as a dedicated sniffer.

But speaking of the nRF52 board, I have a problem using it as a sniffer in that I have to set a capture filter of RSSI >= -50, to limit the amount of detected traffic, so that the BLE device I want to connect to will show up in the interface "Device" list even though it shows up in the capture log. Is there any way to manually add a known device to the "Device" list (using a display filter does no good)?

Randy

[haakonsh]

You can right click the BLE address and Apply as Filter -> Selected