Bluetooth - reverse engineering

The post on Thermopro reverse engineering is instructive and has nice links to information on bluetooth fundamentals

• Reverse Engineering a ThermoPro thermometer

• Microsoft: Bluetooth LE explorer
• Nordic nRF sniffer
• Nordic nRF52840 Dongle $10
• Nordic Dongle - get started
• Adafruit: Bluefruit LE Sniffer (nRF5182) $25

Adafruit cautions that their sniffer works only with BLE, not classic Bluetooth. This limitation likely applies to other sniffers.

I read that the Adafruit sniffer can be used with linux. But the Nordic Dongle is said to work well with linux, and is cheaper.

I go ahead and order the Nordic dongle from Digikey. I select USPS shipping for $5, so it will cost me $15

Nordic claims:

"The nRF52840 Dongle is a small, low-cost USB dongle that supports Bluetooth 5.4, Bluetooth mesh, Thread, Zigbee, 802.15.4, ANT and 2.4 GHz proprietary protocols."