Bluefruit LE Sniffer - Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE 4.0) - nRF51822 - v1.0

Description

Interested in learning how Bluetooth Low Energy works down to the packet level? Debugging your own BLE hardware, and trying to spot where something is going wrong? Or maybe youre writing a custom application for your phone or tablet that needs to talk to existing BLE hardware, but you dont know how it works beneath the surface? We have the perfect tool for you!

This Bluefruit LE Friend is programmed with a special firmware image that turns it into an easy to use Bluetooth Low Energy sniffer. You can passively capture data exchanges between two BLE devices, pushing the data into Wireshark, the open source network analysis tool, where you can visualize things on a packet level, with useful descriptors to help you make sense of the values without having to crack open the 2000 page Bluetooth 4.0 Core Specification every time.

Plug it into your development machine, fire up the special sniffer bridge SW, select the device you want to sniff, and it will fire up Wireshark for you and start pushing data in via a live stream (using Nordics Windows software), or save to a pcap file that you can analyze with Wireshark later.

The sniffer firmware cannot be used with the the Nordic DFU bootloader firmware, which means that if you want to reprogram this devices you must use a J-Link + SWD adapter! You cannot over-the-air reprogram it.

Technical Details

• 18mm x 61mm x 7mm / 0.7" x 2.4" x 0.3"
• Weight: 6.5g

FTDI Driver Requirements

Before you can start talking to the sniffer, youll need to install a standard FTDI driver for the FT231x located on the device.

Find the appropriate FTDI VCP installer on the FTDI Driver Download Page, install it on you system, and then insert the sniffer in any USB port on your system.

Using the Sniffer

There are currently two ways to use the sniffer:

1. Nordics nRF Sniffer Utility (Windows only)

If you are on Windows, the best user experience will be had by using the official Nordic nRFSniffer application, available as a download from Nordic Semiconductors after creating a My Pages account, and regitering your device using the product ID located on the Bluefruit LE Sniffer packaging.

2. Python API (Cross-Platform, no Registration)

If you are not using Windows, or dont wish to create a MyPages account, the alternative is to use a Python interface to communicate with the nRFSniffer firmware, which will log any traffic to a libpcap file that can be opened directly in Wireshark. This has been tested on OS X 10.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows 7, but it currently doesnt support streaming data directly into Wireshark via named pipes (though this is possible with some platform-specific effort).

See also

• More about Nordic nRF Sniffer
• More about Python API
• Standard AT