Does BLE stop advertising after a while?

[ujwal]

Hello,

I a developing a custom application on a custom board with nRF51822 and SDK 10.0. I am also a newbie with BLE, so please bear with me.

I have succeeded in incorporating the battery bas and device information dis services into my application, and I can see the device on my iphone. I use the LightBlue iOS app on the phone, and it correctly identifies the two services and actually reports the data correctly.

However, if I leave the board running and take my phone out of range for a while and then come back to it, the LightBlue app on the iPhone does not see the device or services anymore. If i reboot the board, it shows up again.

I am not entirely sure where the problem is. Does the softdevice stop advertising after a while? Is there a better BLE sniffer I can use on the phone?

Thanks!

-ujwal

[Eric Stutzenberger]

Hi ujwal,

If you started from one of the Nordic SDK examples, then yes, advertising likely stops after 180 seconds. At the top of main.c, look for APP_ADV_TIMEOUT_IN_SECONDS. You should be able to change this to 0 so that your application will always advertise unless your code specifically tells it to stop. At one point there was a bug in the SDK which prevented infinite advertising but I believe this was fixed at some point.

Hope this helps,

Eric

[ujwal]

Hi Eric,

I am feeling a bit sheepish and silly...that was indeed the case. I usually look out for such things, but in this case, I missed it. Thanks so much for the very prompt response and providing the correct answer.

Cheers!

-ujwal