Master Emulator go crazy after a connect fail

[Eric YY]

Hi,

I'm using the Master Emulator DLL to build a VB, everything seems go fine. However I found that if there's a device discovered but fail to connect by some result (eg. if the device just shut off the BLE; or if it's too far away). Once connection failed, it cannot start device discovery again. Whenever I start discovery after such condition, the masterEmulator.StartDeviceDiscovery will also return FALSE. The only thing I can do is quite the program and re-start it.

I can also repeat the problem by NetworkAvailabilityDemo example code.

So, is there anyway I can do to "recover" such condition?

I'm using the latest DLL (2.1.13.14), x86 version, using the PCA10031 dongle.

My code about the discovery is:

---

'Start discovery
Public Sub startDeviceDiscovery()
    Dim scanPara As BtScanParameters = New BtScanParameters
    scanPara.ScanType = BtScanType.ActiveScanning

    If Not g.masterEmulator.IsDeviceDiscoveryOngoing Then
        g.masterEmulator.StartDeviceDiscovery(scanPara)
    End If

    g.isBusy = False
    MainForm.updateUI()

End Sub

[Bjørn Inge]

Could it be that the IsDeviceDiacoveryOngoing is out of sync, meaning it has not been correctly set to false when a connection establishment has failed?

[Eric YY]

Well, the IsDeviceDiscoveryOngoing is one of the property reported by the masterEmulator library... I expect it to be correctly set to false after the connection failed... Should I need to do something?

BTW, seems this is a ReadOnly prperty, there's no way I can set it...

[Bjørn Inge]

It might be that MasterEmulator IsConnected state is not updated properly (by MasterEmulator itself) after a connection establishment has failed, and consequently the code that sets IsDeviceDiscoveryOngoing is unreachable. A log file (%ProgramData%/Nordic Semiconductor/MasterEmulator/log.txt) would be helpful.
As for workaround you could call Reset()

[Eric YY]

Seems Reset() doesn't work, I amended the program to:

Public Sub startDeviceDiscovery() Dim scanPara As BtScanParameters = New BtScanParameters scanPara.ScanType = BtScanType.ActiveScanning

If Not g.masterEmulator.IsDeviceDiscoveryOngoing Then
    If Not g.masterEmulator.StartDeviceDiscovery(scanPara) Then
        g.masterEmulator.Reset()
        g.isBusy = False
        MainForm.updateUI()
        Exit Sub
    End If
End If

g.isBusy = False
MainForm.updateUI()

End Sub

But it still failed after Reset(). You can have a look on the log.txt at: www.dropbox.com/.../log.txt

[Bjørn Inge]

I can see that the log file is having duplicate entries, it's not a good sign though it's not necessarily a problem. I'm not sure why reset is not working, another approach would be to use Close()/Open(), though that requires running PerformPipeSetup() and Run() again. You could also try to use a different example project, nRF Uart is the most recent project.