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?

[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]

Yes, it is very odd. I ran it in purple (normal beaconing), yellow (config) Sw2, and even blue (Sw1) mode. Nothing. My app is designed to show information (even if very brief) anytime it grabs a signal. I left it running for almost an hour and it never picked up the beacon. I turned on another BLE that I know only beacons once every 1-2 seconds, and my app saw it just fine. It never once saw the Nordic beacon. I will try changing the advertising rate later, though at the default 760ms, it's still faster than the other beacon that definitely works, and should have been seen without fault at least once.