Any chance to get support for multiple advertising messages?

[Marius Heil]

Hello,

I really need the ability to switch between different advertising messages. Could you please (please!) add a callback after an advertising message has been sent or allow different advertising messages to be queued? I want e.g. two advertising messages A and B to be sent like this:

A B A B A B

The radio notification handler is called far too often and cannot distinguish between connections, advertising, etc,..... I could use a timer, but this will run completely asynchronous to the Softdevice scheduler. I want to have a clean solution for this problem.

Thanks, Marius

[Wojtek]

If two advertising messages are enough, why don't you use scan response?

[Marius Heil]

Has to be advertising messages because of interoperability with other devices.

[Hung Bui]

Hi Marius,

I don't think what you request is very common, I haven't seen many applications require that (or simply ok with the scan response).

I can't think of a clean solution for this. What you described of using a timer maybe the closest on what you can do to achieve.

I am also thinking of counting the distance between Active and nActive radio notification signals to measure the size of the packet. And if you have a fixed length of 31 bytes payload for the advertising packet, there is a chance that you can distinguish between a connection event packet (max 36 bytes) and a advertising packet (max 46 bytes). Of course there is a chance that the radio notification be skipped because of 2 radio events are too close. But if that's the case I would hope that the timing can also point out that it's a connection event + advertising event or not.

[Marius Heil]

But what happens if a beacon wants to advertise both EddyStone and iBeacon messages? I think that's a very simple use-case and I do not see any clean solution to achieving this.

Wouldn't it be possible to include the type of radio activity in the radio notification callback? Just a simple unsigned short would be enough to distinguish between the different kinds of radio activity. Or is this very problematic from the SoftDevice Architecture?

[Hung Bui]

I understand, Marius. I guess for the beacon application, it would be OK to use a timer to switch between Eddystone and iBeacon as timing and sequencing are not very important.

I will send your request internally to R&D for assessment.