Getting data out of BLE v3.0.0 in nRF Connect for Desktop

[jkbecker]

Hi!

I'm trying to sniff BLE advertising traffic using nRF Connect for Desktop on macOS and a nRF52840 Dongle.

I am running nRF Connect Desktop 3.8.0 on macOS Mojave 10.14.6.

When running a Bluetooth Low Energy discovery scan, I am getting things like this:

However, none of the values seem to be selectable. I work a lot with payloads encoded in ManufacturerSpecificData and typing the contained values out by hand just to parse them further is not a viable option.

Is there a way of exporting a CSV of the discovered device data or any other way to extract information into a file format that allows for post-processing in nRF Connect for Desktop? If not, is there another good way to get to this data using the nRF52840 Dongle?

[Simonr]

Hi Johannes

Does the Dongle LED pulse in red, indicating that it is indeed in the bootloader mode? What is the device called in the nRFConnect Programmer on your side? I just tested on two separate Dongles on my end and I'm not able to reproduce this on my end. I also see that you're using a MacOS. There has been some issues with nRFConnect for Desktop v3.8.0 on Mac and Linux, and we're currently working on a bug fix release. Hopefully this will be released sometime this week. Until then, the workaround is to disconnect J-Link devices from the computer before starting nRFConnect for Desktop. So you can try that as well.

You can also try programming the Dongle by using the nRF Command line tools instead. Please check out our Dongle Programming tutorial for more details on how to program, recover, and handle the Dongle in general.

Best regards,

Simon

[jkbecker]

Thanks Simon, I finally got it programmed - moved over to a Windows machine and had no issues there.

I installed the nRF sniffer library and added it to Wireshark, and it shows up in the interface list - however, I'm not seeing any advertising traffic. Wireshark reports "<live capture in progress>" in the status bar at the bottom and I'm getting a green flashing activity indicator on the dongle, but no traffic is showing up.

What's the best way to further debug this? I feel like I must be almost there, but there's one detail somewhere that I'm missing which prevents traffic from showing up in Wireshark.

[jkbecker]

Just for some additional context, when I run this directly (from inside Wireshark's extcap directory):

/usr/local/Cellar/[email protected]/3.9.4/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Python nrf_sniffer_ble.py --capture --extcap-interface /dev/cu.usbmodem14101-None --fifo /tmp/capdata

and then tail -f /tmp/capdata | hexdump, I get a large stream of bytes which I believe to be BLE packets, at least based on the fact that I can spot the access address sometimes:

....they just never show up in Wireshark for some reason...?

[jkbecker]

Update... Error on my part, I was running an incompatible (outdated) version of Wireshark. Updating to 3.4.9 solved it!