RN4020 to RN4871 Update 2

In this post and the follow on post, I discussed the changes I have made for this transition to the RN4871.   I am getting near the end of this being done.  After testing with a several Play Store Apps (Nordic, Silicon Labs, and Microchip) I found that the name I assigned to the RN4871 was not showing up in the scan.  Again in the RN4020 this was not an issue, the SDN command was sufficient.  But for the RN4871 or maybe the version of BTLE that is running, this is an issue.  Unless you know the MAC address, the user would have a hard time determining which device listed is the Brick Buddy.  It is not uncommon for me to see 10-15 BTLE devices in my lab.  Not sure where they are all coming from, but these is a lot.  

Well it became apparent from examining those devices I was seeing that had a name attached, they were placing this in the Advertisement.  The RN4871 has an Advertisement limit of 30 bytes (31 bytes in later firmware).  Fortunately I had 11 bytes left from 30. So I added the name and that brought me up to 27 bytes total.  But as with adding the service, you could not just put the name in as text, as here.

NA,09,B_Buddy  

The NA command requires the actual hex bytes that represent the name.  This is alluded to in the RN4871 documentation, but is not really clear.  The 09 is the command for the complete local name.  

NA,09,422D4275646479     

It seems that everything works now.  The Android App finds it, connects automatically and the name is displayed with the last two address octets attached.  The Android App does allow you to name the Brick Buddy device and then bind that name to the MAC address.  From then on, it shows the name instead of the MAC address.  A more user friendly approach when you have multiple Brick Buddy's in a MOC.

Final change will be a check to see if the  RN4871 Non Volatile Memory (NVM) is valid.  Not sure how to do this yet.  I am somewhat concerned that reloading the NVM on every restart will wear this out too soon.  Especially for the device(s) I use for development.  The easiest way is probably to place a flag in the PIC EEPROM (or I2C memory when it is installed) that indicated a valid NVM.  Thus when the NVM is written and all commands have been accepted, the flag would be updated.  I currently have a config word that is kept, I just need to add this to it.