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Dynamic TX power not possible with zephyr controller and extended advertising

Hello fellow bit jugglers!

We are developing an application for a nRF52805 on a nRF52-DK board, using NCS.

NCS version: 1.7.1

Zephyr version: 2.6.99-ncs1-1 (commit 18e072b03270436fcd58312217fa8f362abb5ccd)

BLE controller: Zephyr

IDE: SEGGER studio

OS: Windows 8

The problem we face is that we can't get dynamic TX power (TX power in dBm selectable during runtime) running under the following conditions:

- use the Zepyhr controller, not the standard Nordic controller (we need to use the Zepyhr controller due to RAM shortage)

- use extended advertising (also a given for our application)

We noted this behaviour in our application, but to demonstrate it with a minimal reproducable example, I modified the sample bluetooth/hci_pwr_ctrl.

The only changes we made to the example were:

- use the Zepyhr controller

- use extended advertising

The exact changes are attached. (Final files + git patch)

The problem we face is that the extended message appears in the nRF connect app, but the RSSI value does not change significantly (around -46 dBm).

When I change the controller back to Nordic controller (by removing CONFIG_BT_LL_SW_SPLIT=y), the RSSI value steadily decreases, as expected.

I guess the problem must be somewhere inside the Zepyhr controller, but I was not able to trace the calls through the various layers there (Ticker, Mayfly, lll, ...)

Any idea?

Cheers

Pat

Parents
  • Hi Pat

    Håkon is currently unavailable, and I will handle your case in the mean time. 

    I tested your changes and seem to see the same here. When using normal advertising it works fine both with the Nordic and Zephyr controller, but once you enable extended advertising the RSSI doesn't change significantly. 

    I will have to look into this more next week and get back to you. 

    Best regards
    Torbjørn

Reply
  • Hi Pat

    Håkon is currently unavailable, and I will handle your case in the mean time. 

    I tested your changes and seem to see the same here. When using normal advertising it works fine both with the Nordic and Zephyr controller, but once you enable extended advertising the RSSI doesn't change significantly. 

    I will have to look into this more next week and get back to you. 

    Best regards
    Torbjørn

Children
  • Hey Torbjørn!

    Nice of you! I'm glad you could reproduce it! Have a nice weekend!

    Pat

  • Hi Pat

    According to the developers we can't support the Zephyr controller directly, since this is not developed by us (but by the Zephyr community), but there is a Discord channel available to ask questions to the Zephyr developers. 

    Most likely this is a missing feature in the implementation of advertising extensions, since this is a relatively new feature in the Zephyr controller. 

    I will check with the developers on Discord and see if they have some input on this. 

    Best regards
    Torbjørn

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