BLE: MAC Address questions

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Anonymous
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Hello,

My goal is to know if I can effectively identify a BLE advertiser from its MAC address. That would allow my central deivce to know what devices it sees without having to connect to it and ask for information (such as its serial number).

Even though I can read the MAC addresses from the central device, their values are all the same! (i have several devices) The MAC address seems to be determined during the programming of my BCM20736 : if I compile & program the chip from another computer, the MAC address I see will be different.

Can I have access to a truly unique number that is hard-coded into the BLE hardware and that is accessible from advertising packets?

Cheers,

Arthur

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MichaelF_56
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All of our devices ship with the same BD_ADDR programmed, that is no secret.

The expectation is that customers will obtain a block of addresses for production and program these addresses into their product.

BD_ADDR - how do you get one?

This user figured out how to program a unique value into serial flash: https://community.broadcom.com/thread/2244?q=unique%20serial%20number

You could most likely make a number like this available on the module/end-product, and possibly within the notifications/advertisements sent, but it would not be a standard practice, so you could not always depend on the number being available across all BT peripherals.

I think the BD_ADDR is the best approach.

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