Wireshark BLE Sniffer is not showing any packets during or after Peripheral connect

[Danjx]

I start the sniff and see packets from all advertising peripherals in the area.
I select my peripheral in the Device dropdown list.
Then I see a string of "ADV_IND" packets from my device only.
I have no Capture or Display filter active.
All well and good.

Then I enable my Central device and start the connect.
-> They connect without any trouble and start streaming data.
However all I see in Wireshark is a single "CONNECT_IND" packet. Nothing else.

--> I don't see any other packets!
Does anyone have any guesses as to what I'm doing wrong?
Driver/firmware/software versions perhaps?

Setup:

- Mac (Catalina)

- nRF51822 v2 (with Driver = Silicon Labs: CP210x Macintosh OS VCP Driver v6)
(note: dongle came preprogrammed from Adafruit, April 6, 2021)

- Wireshark v 3.4.4 (and Python v3.9.4)

- nRF_sniffer_for_bluetooth_le_3.1.0

Thank you in advance for any suggestions.

[Danjx]

Yes. That's where I started. (Along with downgrading Python back to v2.7.16 and installing pip and the old pyserial and creating the presribed environment and downgrading Wireshark) But with that setup Wireshark never even finds the sniffer. So I was happy when I got to a point where I could find the UART.

But okay, I get it. I'll shop for a new sniffer and let you know.

In the meantime, maybe you can suggest to Adafruit that they stop selling this outdated time waster, because it makes you both look bad.

[Simonr]

Duly noted! Thank you for your feedback, and I'm very sorry for the inconvenience. I'll keep you updated on the status of our internal ticket regarding the nRFSniffer on Catalina.

Best regards,

Simon

[Danjx]

Problem solved.

The ($25) Bluefruit LE Sniffer (nRF51822 v2) Time Waster from Adafruit is now in the trash.

I replaced it with a ($10) nRF52840 Dongle from Digikey and flashed it. The Wireshark BLE Sniffer now works as expected.

[Simonr]

Glad to hear you got it working at least, and I'm sorry that you had such a poor experience with the Adafruit device. This has been reported internally.

Best regards,

Simon