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The hardest BLE bugs hide between the layers. The app log says everything looks fine, but a notification never arrives, a reconnect drops, or a flow stalls. The truth is one layer down, on the bus or on the air, where the application never sees it. Adsum debugs across all three observability layers of a BLE connection and correlates them, so you see exactly where a flow actually broke:
  • App log: the RTT/UART output your firmware prints. What the application thinks happened.
  • HCI (host-controller bus): the Host Controller Interface event stream, decoded to human-readable BLE events. What the host actually told the controller to do, and what came back.
  • Over-the-air radio: the sniffer capture. What actually hit the air.
Here it is catching a real one, on a production gateway build: clean logs, a tag five centimetres from the antenna, and nothing received. The agent flashed an nRF52840 dongle as a sniffer itself, captured 36 advertisements on the air against 0 received, and traced it to an RF front-end that was never switched on: a bug no amount of code reading finds.
The bug, the capture, and the fix, written up in full as chapter two of the gateway build.
Adsum IoT Coder guided 3-layer debug: the sniffer-dongle setup step of the walkthrough, reading curated nRF knowledge files and rendering a generated nRF52840 dongle DFU-mode diagram, in VS Code

The guided sample run walks the sniffer setup step by step, reading curated nRF knowledge and rendering the hardware diagram for you.

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Try it with no hardware

The fastest way to see it is the guided sample run, on a bundled sample with nothing of your own open:
1

Open the guided 3-layer debug

From the home, pick the three-layer BLE debug sample. No board, no key, no project of your own needed.
2

Watch a real bug surface across the layers

The walkthrough follows a real one-directional BLE bug: the app log is blind to it, the HCI bus shows the gap, and the over-the-air capture confirms it, landing on the one-line fix.
3

Take it live (optional)

The same debugging runs on your own nRF boards. The guided run walks you through the sniffer-dongle setup, including the hardware steps, so you can capture the radio layer on your bench.

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How it works

The agent loads a curated nRF debug workflow and the relevant board knowledge, then walks the steps with you. It parses the HCI event stream into readable BLE protocol events, correlates the three layers against each other, and points at the exact place a flow broke, rather than dumping packets for you to read. The radio layer uses a standard nRF52840 dongle as the sniffer; the walkthrough handles the DFU-mode and firmware-flashing setup. It bridges into the CRA readiness check too: once you understand a BLE flow, you can check the same build’s secure-by-design posture in one click.

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Scope

  • Available for Nordic nRF BLE projects today (CONFIG_BT detected). Extending 3-layer decoding beyond BLE is on the roadmap.
  • The agent narrates the decode and proposes the fix. You confirm it on your hardware; the last word is yours.