PC Application to get device name and RSSI

[Martin Aeberhard]

I was asked to create a windows application to get the device name and the signal strength of nearby modules with a nrf ble module.

The idea is to have an application the writes the device name of the device with the strongest signal to a file.

Finally this ID should be printed on a stricker that will be sticked to the customer's module holding the ble-module.

Perhaps labelling will be done after connecting the module to be sure to label the correct one.

Where do I start best?

Is it correct that there is no c# library available? (up to now I was working with delhi and c#)

I am working wiith a nRF52840MDX Usb Dongle on PC side and multiple modules holding a Fanstel BT832A based on nRF52832CIAA.

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Hi,

The best approach depends a bit on your requirements and which SDK you are planning to use.

We have the pc-ble-driver, which can be used to create C/C++ BLE applications (or Python/node.js through the available wrappers - unfortunately, there is no C# wrapper available). This is using the serialization solution from nRF5 SDK to control the BLE stack (Softdevice) over UART. This solution gives you full access to the softdevice API and allows you to control any BLE parameter like an on-chip application.

Another alternative if you want to use the more modern nRF Connect SDK is to write an application interacting with the Zephyr Bluetooth Shell application. You can then write your application to communicate with the board over UART to the command line, executing the required commands to start the BLE operations and get the desired information. You may have to add some additional commands to the shell to get all information you need, see the Shell documentation. The following commands should get you started:

bt init
bt scan on

There is also a similar example in nRF5 SDK: BLE Interactive Command Line Interface Example.

Best regards,
Jørgen

[Martin Aeberhard]

Hi Jørgen,

thanks for your answer. It looks like this is a possible way to get my problem solved.

Best regards

Martin