nRF Beacon with Scanning Feature

[FA]

Hi,

I have a couple of nRF Beacons and want to change the program so that it scans for iBeacon packets before starting to advertise.

The flashed program is just advertising and I think uses S110 soft device. Correct me if I'm wrong:

• For adding the scan feature I have to program S130, and I expect that the same program (advertising) should work without any change, but it will just give me the feature of scanning too.

• I need a simple example for "scanning". I think the "Sniffer" program does that on the nRF DKs but that one is in HEX only.

• I found this topics: devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../

I think I should be able to use the scanning features from that program, but as the program was with S130 0.9.0-1 and PCA10001, would it cause a problem? I'm still a beginner about nRF MCU registers and board specific pins, but I think one of the tutorials was saying that you can change the target board in Keil and the required header files will be added, so that the program should run on a different board (here PCA20006).

Thanks, FA main_woPointer.c main_wPointer.c

[Petter Myhre]

SoftDevice S120 can be a periheral or a central, while S130 can be a peripheral and a central.

You advertising program should work.

The sniffer is something else. You should look at the examples in ble_central or ble_central_and_peripheral.

I ported the example in the linked question to SDK 9.0.0 and S130 1.0.0. Download here. Used ble_app_hrs_rscs_relay as a base, I didn't clean the project, but main.c is clean.

Unzip it into \examples\ble_central_and_peripheral\experimental\

You need to put the address of the device you are scanning for into search[].

LED1 will toggle every time you recieve an advertising packet from the other device.

[FA]

Hi Petter,

Thanks for the sample program. As I wanted to keep the advertising part of the Beacon program for nRF Beacon kit (PCA20006) I decided to keep all parts of that program and add the additional required lines (in the attached PDF, Yellow highlights are the codes that I added based on your program, and pink highlights are changes that I made to get rid of errors). Here is what happened:

1- Beacon program was in SDK 7 and S110. So, I changed the include paths to S130 headers in SDK 9, and also removed "ble_dfu.h" and added the new one from SDK 9.

2- By doing this I got few errors in some function calls (pink highlights), such as

• no member named "timeout" in"ble_gap_sec_params_t"
• one argument missing for "sd_ble_gap_sec_params_reply" and "sd_ble_gatts_sys_attr_set"
• no member named "priph.keys" and "div" in CASE BLE_GAP_EVT_SEC_INFO_REQUEST (which I omitted completely from the cases!)

3- I had to change LED1 to LED_RGB_BLUE which is the pin number for PCA20006 LED.

The programs was built without error, but after programming S130 from SDK 9, I was getting error for programming the actual program. It was saying that the program has data in the Soft_Device part. I noticed that with S110, soft device was after x16000 in memory, while with S130 it was after x1C000. So, in the Target Options in Keil I changed the IROM start to x1C000.

With these changes I could program the board. But! it seems the program in not actually running or there is an error inside.

In the MAIN, the only change made is that, the program starts scanning and after the addresses are mateched, START=TRUE and it will exit a WHILE LOOP and should start Advertising like the normal beacon:

scan_init(); scan_start(); led_softblink_start(LED_R_MSK); while (!start) { }

As you can see even if it waits in the while loop, I think LED_SOFTBLINK_START should make the RED led blink, but nothing happens.

So, I don't know if I had to update some more files to make it work (although Keil doesn't give any errors) or something else is going wrong.

Attached are the main.c and the hex file.

main.pdf main.c nrf51822_beacon_app.hex

[Hung Bui]

Hi FA,

Next time please reply to a answer by using comment, not to create another answer. If you have trouble with the length limit, pleas split the comment into several comment. You can attach files by editing your question.

We are on limited staff right now due to the summer period so I afraid we don't have enough resource to look into the code and fix the errors for you.

My suggestion for you is:

• Study the example for S130 in the nRF51 SDK where we do scanning. Such as the ble_app_hrs_c example. In that example we do both, scanning and advertising.

• Try to add the code to advertise as a beacon into the S130 example instead of porting the code for S130 into the beacon example since the API changed.

• If you want to have the extra feature such as configuration mode and bootloader mode, you would need to invest some more time on porting the code to the new SDK.

• Try to get hold of a nRF51 DK or a board that has nRF51 revision 3 on board. The reason is that S130 is not officially support revision 2 chip and not tested with revision 2 chip. It's the same chip on the PCA20006 and the PCA10001.

[FA]

Hi, Due to the application that I'm looking at, I have to use PCA20006. If you are saying that it can not go into scan mode because of chip revision, then that means I have to design a new hardware with a newer chip to test my program, which I'm trying to avoid at least for the initial tests. The program I posted will be built without any error, but the problem is that it seems after programmed it will never actually run on the board. So, maybe S130 on the board is an issue. I'll try to see if S130 examples will run on the board or not. But can you confirm that about changing the IROM start address I did the right changes and that's normal when programming different SDs?

[FA]

Ok, I used the short program you prepared as follows: I wanted to scan first and after receiving a packet from a specific address, start advertising. So, I used SCAN_START() and after that put an empty WHILE loop like "WHILE (!start) {}, with START initialized to zero and trying to change it when an address match is detected in SWITCH-CASE of ON_BLE_EVT function. Here is what happened: The program can detect the correct address, but it seems it can not change the value of START and as a result it won't come out of the empty while loop! I think this should be a problem of declaration of START and if the "STATIC void ON_BLE_EVT" function is able to change that. Any help in this method or any other suggestions is welcomed! So, problem is: we have a global variable set to 0 and used as WHILE condition. We want it to be changed when the BLE EVENT is detected and the address is matched