Modifying beacon advertising data while advertising

RE: Modifying beacon advertising data while advertising

Hung Bui — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 08:48:40 GMT

Hi Jordan,
Yes we have similar concept for radio notifications in nRF Connect SDK. Now it's moved to MPSL module since the Softdevice doesn't exist.
https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF_Connect_SDK/doc/latest/nrfxlib/mpsl/doc/radio_notification.html#
APIs are here:
https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF_Connect_SDK/doc/latest/nrfxlib/mpsl/doc/api.html#mpsl-radio-notification

RE: Modifying beacon advertising data while advertising

Kyle — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 15:34:16 GMT

Hi Hung Bui ,

This is really interesting. In the time since I posted this question though, we've actually moved to the nRF Connect SDK, which doesn't have the concept of a "softdevice" anymore. Are you familiar with any way to achieve the same objective in nRF Connect?

RE: Modifying beacon advertising data while advertising

Hung Bui — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 14:51:24 GMT

Hi Kyle,
Regarding 1, there isn't a softdevice's event that signal when an advertising packet is about to send. However, you can think of using radio notification. It's the event that you can set up so that the softdevice can signal the application when the radio is about to start or when the radio session is about to finish.
You can read about it here: https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/topic/sds_s132/SDS/s1xx/radio_notif/radio_notification.html?cp=5_7_3_0_10

However it can not tell you what kind of activity it's doing, only tell if it's doing TX or RX. So if you have a complex application (connection/multi connections and advertising at the same time) it would be difficult to keep track of which activity it's going to do.

However, if you simply do non-connectable advertising, it shouldn't be to hard to keep track.

RE: Modifying beacon advertising data while advertising

Kyle — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 15:49:50 GMT

I managed to get it working with a timer that calls the sd_ble_gap_adv_set_configure function on a fixed interval. I ended up preallocating two data structs and switching between them each time I updated the data (i.e. set the new data in the struct not being used, then call sd_ble_gap_adv_set_configure with that struct). Important note for other users: when calling sd_ble_gap_adv_set_configure after it's already been called, the `p_adv_params` argument must be `NULL`.

I'm still looking for a solution to question (1) though (a hook to update the data immediately before transmission), so if anyone has an idea for that, it would be much appreciated!