Computer Access Technology has developed the Merlin Mobile Bluetooth protocol analyzer, a full-featured Bluetooth protocol analyzer in a PC Card format. Merlin Mobile offers Bluetooth developers a portable, low-cost solution for quickly pinpointing problems to dramatically reduce the time needed to debug device or piconet operation.

This portable solution is the most recent addition to CATC's line of Bluetooth development tools and is based on the Merlin Protocol Analyzer. The card is a non-intrusive design verification system that provides Bluetooth network traffic capture, display and analysis. It utilizes the same proprietary “CATC Trace” graphical display format to display Bluetooth traffic in a color-coded and easy-to-understand fashion. The industry-standard PC card form-factor provides broad hardware compatibility and gives developers, technical support and sales personnel a powerful and highly portable test solution that can be utilized virtually anywhere.

The device features an “Air Probe” radio interface that allows users to capture and analyze Bluetooth traffic broadcasts within a piconet. this includes baseband, LMP, L2CAP, SDP, RFCOMM, TCS and OBEX layers of the Bluetooth protocol stack. Additionally the device provides decodes for HDLC, PPP, BNEP, HID and AT commands. It also provides the ability to created custom decodes by using a unique “user defined decoding” feature.

After capturing the data, the device's advanced filtering system allows a user to sort, highlight and arrange the data in a way that best suits the user's desired test scenario. Users can pinpoint the exact area of interest without sorting through large amounts of data.

Identifying and analyzing abnormal piconet traffic conditions and decoding standard Bluetooth protocol messages can be done quickly and efficiently, minimizing cost and time expenditures. For complex sequences, the system provides a transaction view that displays packets in a hierarchical progression enabling users to see all of the layers of a particular Bluetooth transaction.

The device's transaction display uses color to present the captured data. Packets are presented in separate rows with individual fields labeled and color coded for effortless identification.
CATC
www.catc.com

• Bluetooth v1.1 qualified
• Decodes LMP, L2CAP, SDP, RFCOMM, TCS, OBEX, HDLC, PPP, BNEP, HID, and AT commands
• 16-bit type II PC card format
• 32 MB of recording memory