Please note: We currently have limited stock of the August 2018 version of this board, with the CP2014 chip and original voltage regulator. Please contact us if you have questions about which board we have.
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 you're writing a custom application for your phone or tablet that needs to talk to existing BLE hardware, but you don't know how it works beneath the surface? Adafruit has 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 Nordic's Windows software), or save to a pcap file that you can analyze with Wireshark later.
Please Note: You can only use this device to listen on Bluetooth Low Energy devices! It will not work on Bluetooth (classic) devices. The Nordic Wireshark-streaming sniffer software is currently Windows only. They have example code using the python API that will work on any OS to log the sniffed data to a pcap file for analysis so you can use this sniffer with any OS with python.
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.
Check out their tutorial for more details and software downloads!
Technical Details
Revision History:
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As of June 17, 2022 - This board may come with a different regulator than AP2112K due to parts shortages. The regulator can provide at least 150mA.
-
As of March 23, 2022, We've updated the board to use CP2102N instead of CP2104 as the CP2014 has been discontinued and replaced with CP2102n. This USB-to-Serial chip is the same functionality and driver.
- As of August 2018, We now ship the sniffers with Firmware V2 - this improved firmware from Nordic now has better Wireshark-streaming sniffer software that works with all OSes for live-streamed BLE sniffing
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As of April 5, 2017, the board has been updated to change the USB-Serial converter chip to CP2104 and remove the SWD connector (you can get to the SWD connection pads on the bottom of
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As of July 31st, 2015, we're selling an updated version with a black PCB -
the firmware/sniffer code/usage is identical, just the PCB color has
changed!
