Change advertising data in Mesh proxy / dfu / provisioner

RE: Change advertising data in Mesh proxy / dfu / provisioner

Hung Bui — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 09:37:18 GMT

If you are planning to do non-connectable advertising you can use the mesh stack to send your advertising packet (in addition to mesh packet and connectable Proxy advertising packet).

Please have a look at the beaconing example. In the example we send a beaconing advertising packet in addition to mesh packets. You can choose the number of repeats (can set to 1) and receive the call back (advertiser_tx_complete_cb_t) when it's finished sending.

RE: Change advertising data in Mesh proxy / dfu / provisioner

iva2k — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 19:28:36 GMT

It needs to be non-connectable. The data is telemetry / debug nature. We want to be able to send small stream of data out in advertising/beaconing type packets as soon as possible as device powers on, and provide insight into what device firmware is doing. So each new advertising packet will have new chunk of data from a queue. It will be off in all devices by default, but the ones that have issues can be turned on at power-on. Advertising packets will be received and decoded by another device altogether, not by mesh. Our initial idea was to insert few bytes into active advertising packets (not the mesh payload ones), but it looks like needs redesigning the whole mesh layers stack to do it.

RE: Change advertising data in Mesh proxy / dfu / provisioner

Hung Bui — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 10:47:06 GMT

Hi,

You can use mesh to send advertising packet but it would be non-connectable as the mesh stack can't handle a connection. It uses the softdevice for that.

Could you give some more information about your application requirements ? which data you want to change and does it need to be connectable advertising ?

RE: Change advertising data in Mesh proxy / dfu / provisioner

iva2k — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 03:49:52 GMT

Thanks, that confirms what I concluded looking at mesh layers code.

So to send some dynamic data out (which should be outside of mesh), is it possible to use advertiser.c layer directly? Will it work if it is called before mesh_init() is called?

RE: Change advertising data in Mesh proxy / dfu / provisioner

Hung Bui — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 11:00:51 GMT

Hi Ilya,

In our Mesh SDK the mesh stack doesn't handle the connectable advertising. It's handled by the softdevice.

Currently there is no way to receive an event for each advertising packet. You can setup a notification when the radio is active&inactive but if it's a mesh application it's more complex to monitor if it's the advertising activity or not.

The easiest solution if you don't have a very short advertising interval is to use a timer to change the advertising data periodically.