Bluetooth Low Energy Beacon performance

[jeffr...@gmail.com]

I am attempting to use the beaglebone black wireless to receive Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertisements.  I am utilizing a mobile device to transmit BLE advertisements at a 10 Hz frequency.  I am comparing the performance of the beaglebone black wireless to other comparable boards and receive unexpectedly terrible results.  The beagleboard was only able to capture between 20%-30% of the advertised beacons.  With the superior hardware on the beaglebone black wireless, I would expect the performance to be as good or better than the raspberry pi 3.  I have tried several versions of the Debian OS with no change in performance.  I have also tried changing the cpu frequncy to ondemand without any performance enhancements.  Is there anything that someone would suggest doing. I have a strong feeling that it has to do with the the wireless card driver not being fully developed.  If there are any suggestions please feel free to respond. 

Thank You

[drhun...@gmail.com]

Hi,

Do you have wifi enabled and are you using it? The most likely explanation is that the antenna is shared between the Wifi and BLE radios. So when it is busy doing wifi it cannot be listening on BLE for advertisements. As the WL18xx does not know when advertisements will be taking place it cannot schedule the BLE Rx windows for scanning. 

As soon as you are in a BLE connection the BLE RF activity is following a known schedule and so all BLE activity can be scheduled.

In conclusion the best way to get BLE scanning performance is to have Wi-Fi disabled.

Iain