Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 does not work with nRF Mesh Android App

[Alex Ross]

Hello,

Not sure where to direct this (we can open a GitHub issue but wanted to clear it here first), basically everything works great on our Galaxy Tab S6 Lite (SM-P610), can provision, everything. Same for the iOS version. However on the Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 (SM-X200) can see the device to be provisioned, but fails to provision it after the first steps.

We're using the 833 dev kit with soft device 140.  

Thanks,

Alex

[Alex Ross]

Simonr said:

Okay, after some more discussion with more colleagues, I'm afraid there won't be anything we can do. The conflict seems to be between the SoftDevice and the Samsung Galaxy A8 BLE stacks. If we were to do something, since we're not familiar with the A8s stack it would be trial and error until we found a resolution. I'm afraid we won't provide a new SoftDevice update for the nRF5 SDK. I'm very sorry to disappoint.

Best regards,

Simon

So I'm curious about something.

If the STM Mesh App works and you're both following the mesh standard, can't you trace through a sniffer to see their steps and determine where you deviate from how they're doing it?

Shouldn't the procedure be the same for both? It's based off of a spec. 

[Simonr]

Yes, we can do that. I don't have an A8 tablet available to reproduce this though. But if either of you are able to provide a sniffer trace of both apps provisioning/connecting to the same Mesh node we can take a look.

Best regards,

Simon

[JonasJ]

Hi Simonr,

I've capture three traces with the nRF Sniffer and Wireshark.

Two failures with nRF Mesh app and one successful provisioning with ST BLE Mesh app.

The test was done with nRF5 For Mesh SDK v5.0.0 using the dimming server example on nRF52840dk.

nRF Mesh version 3.2.4.

ST BLE Mesh version 1.14.000

The Samsung A8 tablet is updated to latest available firmware. X200XXU1AVG1 / X200OXM1AVG1.

Samsung_A8_nRF_Mesh_nRF5_For_Mesh_SDK_Provisioning_failure_1.pcapngSamsung_A8_ST_BLE_MESH_nRF5_For_Mesh_SDK_Provisioning.pcapngSamsung_A8_nRF_Mesh_nRF5_For_Mesh_SDK_Provisioning_failure_2.pcapng

/Jonas