how to get active beacon list

[Muhammet YILDIZ]

Hi,

I have 5 nrf52832 and nrf52851 beacon boards. All nRFs working in the beacon mode. They all in the same room. I tring to get a list of the active beacons the module can detect. And send the list of active beacon the module can detect over serial to somewhere else like pc not important.

Which mode i should use central or what?

How can i retrieve a list of active beacons?

I also need some technical explanation. How can you help?

Edit: My problem is scanning for beacons without broadcasting any beacon packets. When i get a list i want to process it.How can i do it?

[endnode]

If you want to listen to any BLE advertisement (whatever you call it - beacon or not) you should just scan (so be GAP Observer if you insist on proper language of BT SIG specification). nRF5x chips have just single radio front-end so you can either let it for almost 100% of time just listen and then you should get basically all the packets on given channel or you can also perform other GAP activities (e.g. also advertise) and then the time will be lower (how much that depends). So if you have no problem with power consumption just activate scanning role on top of any S13x Nordic Soft Device with 100% duty cycle (scanning window = scanning interval) and record Adv. report events as you like.

Remember that advertisements are typically done on all 3 channels while Nordic Soft Device scans on one channel at the time. If beacons distribute their Adv packets evenly among 3 channels then in larger statistics you are fine because Nordic Soft Device rotates listening on these channels automatically. If your beacons prefer certain channel then you might have little distorted results.

So to summarize: get any BLE central example from nRF5 SDK, learn how scanning is initiated and how Advertising reports are captured as events and build your list as you want.