Need Help with getting BLE/Wifi working on my custom ESP32 board

[espnoob56]

Hi,

I’m working on a custom ESP32 board using the ESP32-C3FH4X. I can program the chip without any issues and GPIO control works fine.

However, I’m running into trouble with Bluetooth. When I run the ESP-IDF NimBLE advertising example, I can’t see the device in nRF Connect. If I put the board inside a simple Faraday box, I can detect some NimBLE advertising packets, but the signal is too weak to make a proper connection.

To troubleshoot, I removed the matching components and tried attaching a 32 mm wire to the L3 antenna pad. I also tried a few other wire lengths, but I still couldn’t get a usable signal.

Does anyone have ideas on how to best debug this? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

[ESP32_kid]

What power level is the ESP set to for BLE?
The default is +9dm, that's a max setting.

The LNA should be ok at that level, but maybe try a setting of P0. And also note there's power levels for various BLE functions, so look at that too.

My reference to LNA is due to bad VSWR of the mostly crappy antenna's, hence reflected power can swamp the LNA when Tx is set hi. Are you also running wifi too? If so at what power levek?


https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp ... power.html

[espnoob56]

Hi, i used the default settings with the power level set to +9dbm. I tried increasing it to +20dbm and decreasing it to 0dbm but that did not help.

The example I am using is just for Bluetooth without wifi.