Sharks are very good at sniffing, one of the best species in the animal kingdom. They can detect one drop of blood in a million drops of water. So, it is only appropriate that the packet sniffer used in this tutorial for Hexiwear is called Wireshark.
Record and analyze BLE communication packets
In this new tutorial, from our friend Erich Styger (MCU on Eclipse), you’ll learn how to record and analyze BLE communication packets between Hexiwear and Raspberry Pi 3, using Wireshark and Adafruit Bluefruit LE Sniffer.
You can go ahead and read the whole tutorial, but before you do so, here are is some useful information about the software Erich used:
Wireshark and packet sniffing
Wireshark is packet-sniffing program, it's open source and it's used for network troubleshooting, different kinds of analysis, etc. It will make your life a lot easier. Joined with the Bluefruit LE Sniffer, it visualizes data (sent between two devices) on a packet level, with descriptions that help you make sense of the values.
For example, with Wireshark and the Bluefruit LE Sniffer you will be able to record the data packets sent between a mobile phone application and Hexiwear.
Without it you would need to flip through Bluetooth 4.0 core specifications that are massive. It runs on most computing platforms including Windows, OS X, Linux, and UNIX and it's free.
The Bluefruit LE Sniffer passively captures data exchanges between two BLE devices and sends the data into Wireshark. In this tutorial, the two devices are Hexiwear and the Raspberry Pi 3.
According to their official website, Wireshark is a carcharodon photoshopia. Which is a rather good joke, considering that the most famous shark in the world is the great white shark, from the carcharodon genus.
For more information about Hexiwear you can check out www.hexiwear.com
Yours Sincerely,
MikroElektronika