Ble long range demo for nrf9160dk

[wildcat_ksu]

Hello all,

nordic and zephyr newbie here.

I am looking for some help with getting ble with coded phy working on 9160dk using nrfConnect SDK.

I have a 9160dk as central and 52833dk acting as peripheral. 

I have a semi-custom firmware running on 52833dk which is based of off hr coded phy peripheral example.

I can connect to it using another 52833dk running modified firmware based of off central coded phy example.

In developed my 9160dk code looking at central coded phy example, but when I try to start scanning

bt_scan_start(BT_SCAN_TYPE_SCAN_ACTIVE);

I get this error

Scanning failed to start with err -5

Some of the config settings I have

CONFIG_BT=y
CONFIG_BT_H4=y
CONFIG_BT_WAIT_NOP=y
CONFIG_BT_CENTRAL=y
CONFIG_BT_GATT_CLIENT=y
CONFIG_BT_GATT_DM=y
CONFIG_BT_SCAN=y
CONFIG_BT_SCAN_FILTER_ENABLE=y
CONFIG_BT_SCAN_UUID_CNT=1
CONFIG_BT_CTLR_PHY_CODED=y
CONFIG_BT_EXT_ADV=y
CONFIG_BT_USER_PHY_UPDATE=y

My question is if there is something obvious that I am missing or what is something you experts can think of that I should look for?

[Didrik Rokhaug]

Hi,

Are you running the code on the nRF9160 or the nRF52840?

If you are running it on the nRF9160, are you running the hci_uart or hci_lpuart samples on the nRF52840?

Best regards,

Didrik

[wildcat_ksu]

Thanks for quick response Didrik.

Yes. I am running it on nrf9160 and I loaded hci_lpuart on 52840. 
in fact I started with lte_ble_gateway example and connection with a thingy or another 52833 dk without coded phy works.
I started seeing the error when I added coded phy to it. 

[Didrik Rokhaug]

I was able to start scanning if I disabled CONFIG_BT_EXT_ADV.

However, my central did not discover the peripheral I had running, so setting that config to 'n' doesn't seem to solve everything.

[wildcat_ksu]

I will give this a quick shot to see if this works for me. However, along with this not solving everything as you say, my belief is that I need to have CONFIG_BT_EXT_ADV=y to have long range advertisement? 

Having CONFIG_BT_EXT_ADV=y worked well when I was connecting between two nrf52833dks especially using the coded phy HR examples, so does it seem specific to 9160-52840 kind of design? I am also having trouble with other BLE activities like saving bond information on 9160dk, may be all these are related.

[Didrik Rokhaug]

After talking to our BLE experts, we found the solution: You must set CONFIG_BT_EXT_ADV=y on the controller.

Then, with CONFIG_BT_EXT_ADV=y in both the central_hr_coded and hci_lpuart samples, my nRF9160dk was able to find my nRF52840 DK running the peripheral_hr_coded sample.

The reason is that the features on the host and controller must match.