Master emulator control questions

[John]

Hello,

We use the PCA00031 dongle running the MEFW 0.9.0 in our production environment to validate a sensors accuracy. The PCA is controlled by a C# test program using the Master Emulator and Iron Python DLLs. I've been working on the program to see if I can make it detect our devices better and connect to them more reliably. It's been a bit of a struggle because:

1. There are up to 90 devices under test at a time

2. It's a very busy RF environment with 400 or more BLE devices advertising plus a couple of Wi-Fi networks.

3. The devices under test have stringent battery life requirements and we are limited to advertising once every 4 seconds so finding the devices under test is hard.

So I have 2 questions:

1. Is there a way to control how long the Master Emulator tries to connect to a specified device address? Right now it looks like it times out after 10 seconds. This isn't anywhere near long enough with a 4 second advertising rate. I haven't been able to find a way to control this particular setting

2. Any thoughts on scan window and interval settings? Power isn't an issue for the scanner as it's on a PC. The original programmer set them to 150mS and 450mS. I tried various settings such as 4500/4500, 2000/2500, and 200/250 and the performance was worse (fewer devices detected). This really surprised me as I would have expected scanning all the time or close to it would have performed better. The program has to wait for the devices under test to reach stable temperatures so it has plenty of time to scan.

Thanks, John

[Hung Bui]

Hi John,

Master Emulator is pretty old library and we stopped development for it for quite long time. We would suggest you to use ble_pc_driver instead, there is a python binding provided also. With the driver, you have full control of the central, you can stop the connecting at any time.

1. I afraid there is no way to change the connecting time in Master Emulator.

2. The best way for scanning is to have scan windows = scan interval, and both should not be too short (give them at least a few hundred ms). Make sure you advertise on all 3 channels (default behaviour), so it would be less affected by interference.

[John]

Hi Hung,

Thanks for the answer. I'll look at seeing how the ble_pc_driver could be interfaced to my C# program. One thought I wanted to run by you was this: I have a number of nRF52 DK and PDK boards I have been using. Would it be possible to replace the dongle with a NRF52832 dev board and use it to perform the functions the dongle is providing me now?

Thanks, John

[Hung Bui]

If you plan to use the nRF52832 with Master Emulator, I afraid it won't work. As the firmware was made for the nRF51 also the UART pins doesn't match.

If you use nRF52832 for ble-pc-driver, of course it should work.

[John]

Thanks. I was definitely thinking nRF52832 with ble-pc_driver. Your statement on the age of the ME FW and the fact that I'm seeing that the ME is pretty squirrely was making me want to find another platform. Thanks for the help