IPhone BLE vs nrf51822

[Vladimir]

Hello and Happy new year!

My goal - to create ibeacon device. I've bought evaluation board, wrote firmware implementing beacon role and loaded it into PCA10001. It works - I see valid data in master control panel and ios application sees the device. The next step was to make custom board. And now I've got it too. But ios application doesn't see my device as a beacon with new board. Maybe it's a hardware problem, but master control panel sees advertising from the board, which is mean that it's working, or at least working with nrf51822 devices.

So the question is how it can be that nordic's dongle doesn't see any problem with my custom board, but iphone does? What should I do to solve it? If it can help I can attach layout of the device. (On screenshot you can see two device with the same advertisment data: the first one is PCA10001 and the second one is custom board. When the both work iphone sees beacon. If I pull out batteries from PCA10001 beacon device from ios disappears).

[Ole Morten]

I haven't worked a lot with this, but it seems to me that you have the exact same values for all the fields for both your beacons. As far as I can read Apple's documentation, that's not supposed to be done, so it could be that it ignores the second one (which it can see is different based on its address). Have you tried to change the major and/or minor number of it?

[Vladimir]

Yes, I've tried to change major/minor, UUID (so both boards have different values). I've tried different firmware, the one from \nrf51822\board\nrf6310\s110\experimental\ble_app_ibeacon. PCA10001 works in each case, and my board doesn't, but dongle always sees advertisment.

[Ole Morten]

If you use a regular Bluetooth discovery app, are you then able to see both your devices? You can try this with for example LightBlue: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lightblue-bluetooth-low-energy/id557428110?mt=8

[Vladimir]

I've tried LightBlue. It doesn't see my device as peripheral when it (device) works as a beacon. I've tried ble_app_hrs and it doesn't work either. Dongle sees advertisment from both PCA10001 and my board. And LightBlue sees only PCA10001. We have tried different iphones, but result always the same. At the end of january new boards with different layout will arrive and I hope they won't have this problem. But I'm little affraid, that this situation could repeat. From answer on this question and research on web and this portal I assume that this situation, that we are having now is exceptional. Is that true?

[Ole Morten]

Yes, I've never heard anything like this. Have you had your board schematics and layout reviewed? If not, I'd strongly recommend you to post a regular support case including schematics and Gerber (or Altium) files and as for review. The only thing I can think of is some kind of HF-crystal problem, but I find it very strange that the PCA10000 dongle can see it if that's the case.