Project CC2540 | |
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Reverse engineering the CC2540 BLE sniffer dongle | |
Status | Stalled |
Contact | bertrik |
Last Update | 2018-05-13 |
The CC2540 USB Dongle is a complete example of how to use the USB enabled Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Wireless MCU. The reference design can be used to enable Bluetooth Smart and Internet of Things applications on any system that contains a USB host. The CC2540 USB Evaluation Module Kit contains one CC2540 Bluetooth low energy USB Dongle. The dongle can be used to enable Bluetooth low energy on your PC. It can also be used as a packet sniffer for analyzing the BLE protocol and for software and system level debugging (use the free tool SmartRF Packet Sniffer ). SERVICE = 'TI USB CDC Driver'. DESCCC2538 = 'TI CC2538 USB CDC Serial Port' DESCCC2540 = 'TI CC2540 USB CDC Serial Port' DESCCC2544 = 'TI CC2544 USB CDC Serial. It also, on my Windows 8 laptop, causes my USB keyboard to 'lose' some keystrokes. I sniffed some of the Bluetooth traffic using a TI CC2540 dongle and they have a proprietary protocol on top of.
At this point (2017-05-09), the status is:
This page is about the CC2540 bluetooth low-energy sniffer dongle and getting it to work with Linux.A nice end result could be that it becomes possible to sniff directly in WireShark with this dongle.
I have such a 'WeBee' dongle that can be found for about E15,- on websites like Aliexpress.
It's supposedly a CC2540 (or compatible) dongle, the USB id is 0451:16b3.
Interesting links:
When plugging this stick into a Linux machine, you can see it uses only one bulk endpoint.
Reading the identification from the stick with the 0xC0 command, results in the following 8-byte response
You can recognise the 2540 type number in there.
This USB device does actually work with Windows:
I've captured a log of the communication over USB while the BLE is capturing bluetooth traffic from some iBeacon, using USB pcap.
In the logs, I cannot see any firmware blobs being downloaded to the stick.Probably the stick comes with a pre-loaded firmware of itself to do the BLE sniffing.
The USB control transfer request codes seem to match up with the code in https://github.com/christianpanton/ccsniffer/blob/master/ccsniffer.py
In the windows sniffer software, it seems there are only two things communicated:
This appears to be done using USB control transfers.
The following requests are sent:
Request type | Request | Value | Index | Data | Description |
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0x40 | 0xC5 | 0 | 4 | - | Set power |
0xC0 | 0xC6 | 0 | 0 | 0x00 | Get power |
0xC0 | 0xC6 | 0 | 0 | 0x04 | Get power |
0x40 | 0xC9 | 0 | 0 | - | ??? |
0x40 | 0xD2 | 0 | 0 | 0x27 | Set channel |
0x40 | 0xD2 | 0 | 1 | 0x00 | Set channel |
0x40 | 0xD0 | 0 | 0 | - | Start capture |
Request type 0x40 is a vendor-specific device request from host-to-device.Request type 0xC0 is a vendor-specific device request from device-to-host.
This appears to be done using USB bulk input transfers.
I can see a lot of similarities between the USB log and the BLE sniffer log.
Each frame starts with a byte indicating the type of frame, following by two bytes indicating the length of the rest of the frame (encoded as little endian).
The bulk USB data starts off with two bytes indicating the length of the rest of the data.
In the example image on the right:
The stick also returns 4-byte frames, alternating between
and
Interpretation:
Preliminary code can be found athttps://github.com/bertrik/cc2540
It connects to the dongle and dumps raw USB packets to stdout.
This software requires libusb-1.0-dev
NOTICE: The Processors Wiki will End-of-Life on January 15, 2021. It is recommended to download any files or other content you may need that are hosted on processors.wiki.ti.com. The site is now set to read only.
Bluetooth Low Energy Wiki Main Page
This page describes some common configurations when using a CC254x in combination with an external MCU.
Name | Description | Advantages | Disadvantages |
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Network Processor |
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Network Processor GATT_DB_OFF_CHIP |
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Network Processor Custom |
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Stand Alone App with Serial Interface |
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The HostTestRelease project (included with standard BLE SDK) is the standard BLE Network Processor application. It can be loaded on the CC2540 or CC2541, with the any of the following used as a network processor interface:
1. UART
2. SPI
3. USB CDC virtual UART (CC2540 only)
More information on the HostTestRelease project can be found in the CC254x BLE Software Developer's Guide (http://www.ti.com/lit/pdf/swru271). An overview of the HCI command protocol can be found in the TI BLE Vendor Specific HCI Guide, which is linked from the Windows Start Menu after you have installed the SDK.
For applications which only act as a GATT client and do not need to act as a GATT server, this is an ideal choice.
The HostTestRelease project has an option that can be enabled by including the preprocessor define 'GATT_DB_OFF_CHIP' to the project configuration (under compiler settings). By adding this define, the network processor will be built such that any GATT services are maintained by the external MCU. This includes handling of all peer GATT requests to read, write, and discover services and characteristics.
This option provides for maximum flexibility of the GATT server by the MCU; however the code required on the external MCU is fairly complex.
More information on this type of setup can be found here: http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/LPRF_BLE_NPGATT
Rather than using GATT_DB_OFF_CHIP, another possibility is to manually add your GATT profiles to the HostTestRelease project, and rebuild the project with the services integrated into the network processor. This reduces the complexity of the external MCU code; however it requires the ability to add custom commands to the network processor in order to allow the external MCU to manage the data in the GATT services.
More information on this type of setup can be found here: http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/BLE_HostTest_Add_Cmds
Instead of using the HostTestRelease network processor project, another option is to take one of the existing single-chip projects included in the BLE SDK (e.g SimpleBLEPeripheral, HeartRate, RunningSensor, etc...) and modify it to include a 'UART bridge' or a 'SPI bridge', giving the external MCU the ability to communicate with the CC254x.
In addition to creating the brige using the HAL UART or HAL SPI drivers, a communication protocol must be established, allowing the external MCU to send commands to the CC254x (e.g. start advertising, send notification, etc...). It also must allow the CC254x to send event to the external MCU when specific actions occur (e.g. connection established, connection terminated, etc...). For many applications this protocol can be very simple and just consist of a few key commands and events.
More information on this type of setup can be found here: http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/SimpleBLEPeripheral_SerialInterface
See the following wiki page for all 4 UART configuations: http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/All_4_uart_configs
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