S130 V0.9 advertises with significant interrupts

[Yaroslav]

We are developing an application based on S130 V0.9 (orignially S130 V0.5 was used) SoftDevice using development boards PCA10001/PCA10000/Beacon. Main activities of the application are:

a) periodically (this is triggered by commands received from the host which periodically establishes a connection with the device to write configuration data) update Advertisement Data

b) Scan for Advertisement Packets from identical devices

c) If the device receives certain advertisement packet from another device - it will trigger certain actions by using connected LEDs.

This setup more or less (there were some issues in 0.5 I reported earlier and they seem to be fixed in 0.9) worked with S130 v0.5 but once we migrated to S130 v0.9 we are seeing that devices some times unexpectedly stop advertising and after some time ( it can be few minutes ) the advertisement is resumed. I can also see that (the fact that the device stops advertising) by using USB-Dongle and Master Control Panel. Sometimes advertising is not even resumed at all (and I have to reset my device) or I have to wait really long period of time.

Is this known issue? I want to re-iterate - we didn't experience this issue in S130 v0.5 at all but it is very consistent in S130 v0.9. Do you have any hints to solve/workaround it? Our design is pretty much depends on S130 (because we need to simultaneously scan, advertise and be able to be in a connection for very short period of time) so I would appreciate if someone could respond.

Scan parameters:

	scan_param.active		= 0;
	scan_param.selective	= 0;
	scan_param.p_whitelist	= NULL;
	scan_param.timeout		= 0;
	scan_param.interval		= 0x00A0;	// 100 ms
	scan_param.window		= 0x009C;	// <100 ms

Advertising, Connectable:

	adv_params.type        = BLE_GAP_ADV_TYPE_ADV_IND;
	adv_params.p_peer_addr = NULL;
	adv_params.fp          = BLE_GAP_ADV_FP_ANY;
	adv_params.interval    = BLE_GAP_ADV_INTERVAL_MIN * 2;
	adv_params.timeout     = BLE_GAP_ADV_TIMEOUT_GENERAL_UNLIMITED

Advertising, Non-Connectable:

	adv_params.type			= BLE_GAP_ADV_TYPE_ADV_NONCONN_IND;
	adv_params.p_peer_addr	= NULL;
	adv_params.fp			= BLE_GAP_ADV_FP_ANY;
	adv_params.interval		= BLE_GAP_ADV_NONCON_INTERVAL_MIN;
	adv_params.timeout		= BLE_GAP_ADV_TIMEOUT_GENERAL_UNLIMITED

[Petter Myhre]

Could you please edit the question to include your advertising and scan parameters?

[Petter Myhre]

Have you been able to reproduce this with a debugger connected? It would be helpful to have some more information on what is actually happening on the chip.

[Yaroslav]

Yes, I did this. Chip runs normally, application runs too - I can set Break point on calling "err_code = sd_app_evt_wait();" in 'main' and I see that debugger stops here. But this is all that can I do with Debugger. Please tell me what exactly I should do collect the information you are looking for?

[Petter Myhre]

Ok. How often does it happen? Does it happen after a specific set of actions? Could you try to reduce the scan window to 90 and see if that changes anything? (sorry for the late reply)

[Yaroslav]

It isn't reproduced 100%, some times it works long time without any problem, some times it works bad immediately but often after writing characteristics of our service on nRF. Please tell me what additional information you are looking for from me. Our product's development is affected very much because of this issue and it is in our interest to resolve it as fast as possible so I would appreciate Nordic's help here