nRF51 based Capture Dongle with nRF528x devices

[rishavnath satapathy]

Hello There, I found following dongle based on nRF51822. They claim same will work for bluetooth 5.0 also. I know BT5 devices are not backward compatible, so not sure if the device can capture BT5 packets.

Somebody please suggest if nRF51 dongle is capable of sniffing packets from nRf528x based chip.

www.aliexpress.com/.../32800970725.html

[endnode]

That's not true, BT5 devices indeed ARE backward compatible, they just need to default to air speed and PDU lengths of lower standard if they meet such counterpart. However older HW like nRF51 will never capture 2Mbps or long range (500/125kbps) data rates because simply its radio don't listen to them (unless you hack it on completely different level then built-in BLE PHY). If you are asking for cheap sniffer which can capture BT5 high-speed and long-range packets then I have bad news for you: there seems to be no such device yet and there is no sign it would pop up any time soon. So the only alternatives are these professional analyzers in 10-30k USD range (or you can try to do something yourself similar to Ubertooth on TI chips).

[ovrebekk]

Next year we will release a USB dongle based on the nRF52840 device, which would be a good fit for a low cost BT5 sniffer if someone wants to make one ;)

[endnode]

Now that sounds interesting!;)

[rishavnath satapathy]

Thanks Endnode and Torbjorn.

Debugging devices really needed during product developments.

[ovrebekk]

I think it will be a very cool kit, and hopefully cheaper than the nRF51 dongle since we don't need a separate programming chip :)