BLE Sniffer crashing

[bds]

I'm trying to use the BLE sniffer in a quite busy BLE environment. Unfortunately, it always crashes after a few seconds.

I'm using: ble-sniffer_win_1.0.1 nRF51 Dongle J-Lkn 5.12e Windows 7 Pro 64 bit

See attached log file. log.txt

Any ideas?

Added new log file with PCA10028 v1.2.0 and J-Link 5.10m: log.txt

[bds]

If the problem is the UART throughput through the J-Link firmware, could I bypass this with an FTDI cable?

[David Edwin]

Hmmm. The python script seems to be crashing so we should try to remove that from the equation. You can try the PC solutions from Adafruit or the OS X BTLE Sniffer software . If they fail as well, then we can examine the UART interface.

Let us know what happens after you use different PC software.

Added: Ok, as you say, it is not changing with the Adafruit python.

I have a limited work around, it appears that the memory usage of the ble-sniffer PC console is a bit odd as it seems to grow quite fast, so I suggest that you have just the sniffer running so that it has a lot of memory available for itself. The work around is limited as it will eventually run out of memory and crash. I measured usage excess of 100MB when having about 20 devices. I am acknowledging it as a bug and needs a fix.

Using the OS X version of the console seems to be only real work around.

[bds]

I tried the Adafruit software, but it seems this is also using the Python API. And since the problem seems to be in the Python API, it crashes exactly the same. Unfortunately I don't have access to an OSX system. I also verfied that there is no crash if I run the sniffer in an environment with only a few beacons instead of the 20 beacons I have in my test setup.

[bds]

Any update on this?

[David Edwin]

20 beacons is not a lot, what is the nRF51-Dongle version ? Can you down grade your jlink to 5.10n if you are using the latest nRF51-Dongle (PCA10031 v1.1.0). See the section on "J-Link / J-Trace firmware" in the UM08001_JLink.pdf that is present your jlink installation.