How to Find Nordic Beacon Using BLE onLeScan() for Android

[RaQ]

I'm an Android developer and I bought the NRF51822-Beacon kit. All I want to do is be able to "see" the beacon using Android's onLeScan() bluetooth call. However, the beacon doesn't register at all. I can see other BLE devices, but not the Nordic beacon. I have the battery installed and the purple light is flashing which should mean it's beaconing. I don't want to use the Nordic app to "see" the beacon---the whole point is to be able to do it in a generic Android app. Do you know why I can't see the beacon? Is it even possible?

[MartinBL]

Are you able to see the beacon using the Nordic app?

[Artucas]

I also bought two NRF51822-Beacon kit's recently and i had no problems detecting them with my own android app. Are you able to find other devices using onLeScan() method? What is your Android version?

[RaQ]

Yes, I can see the beacon using the Nordic app. I can see other BLE devices using onLeScan(), but not this one. I'm using Android KitKat 4.3. Do I need to install certain firmware or software on the beacon first in order to see it? I would not have thought so, but I haven't really worked with hardware itself before, so I'm not sure.

[Aleksander Nowakowski]

Hi RaQ,

The startLeScan() method from BluetoothAdapter should work for any BLE device, including nordic beacons. If you see the beacon in nRF Beacon app, nRF Master Control Panel or any other app that scans for Bluetooth Smart devices - they use the same API. I would also recommend you to use our compat library for scanning: github.com/.../Android-Scanner-Compat-Library. With t you'll have some more settings and filtering options. The scanning API on Android has changed in 5.0 and this library gives the new functionality to older platforms. but even if you use the bluetoothAdapter.startLeScan(callback) method it should work. Make sure you update your GUI in the UI thread, not in the callback thread.

Could you post you code here?

[RaQ]

Here is the code. It is designed to recognize any BLE device within signal range. I've tested it on many devices. I can't understand why it isn't seeing the Nordic beacon. I'm trying to avoid using Nordic-specific code so I'm not limited to just working with Nordic beacons.