Wi-Fi: Scan

The Scan sample demonstrates how to use the Nordic Semiconductor’s Wi-Fi chipset to scan for the access points without using the wpa_supplicant.

Requirements

The sample supports the following development kit:

Hardware platforms

PCA

Board name

Build target

nRF7002 DK

PCA10143

nrf7002dk_nrf5340

nrf7002dk_nrf5340_cpuapp

Overview

This sample can perform Wi-Fi scan operation in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.

Using this sample, the development kit can scan for available access points in STA mode.

Building and running

This sample can be found under samples/wifi/scan in the nRF Connect SDK folder structure.

When built as firmware image for the _ns build target, the sample has Cortex-M Security Extensions (CMSE) enabled and separates the firmware between Non-Secure Processing Environment (NSPE) and Secure Processing Environment (SPE). Because of this, it automatically includes the Trusted Firmware-M (TF-M). To read more about CMSE, see Processing environments.

To build the sample with Visual Studio Code, follow the steps listed on the How to build an application page in the nRF Connect for VS Code extension documentation. See Building and programming an application for other building and programming scenarios and Testing and debugging an application for general information about testing and debugging in the nRF Connect SDK.

To build for the nRF7002 DK, use the nrf7002dk_nrf5340_cpuapp build target. The following is an example of the CLI command:

west build -b nrf7002dk_nrf5340_cpuapp

Testing

After programming the sample to your development kit, complete the following steps to test it:

  1. Connect the kit to the computer using a USB cable. The kit is assigned a COM port (Windows) or ttyACM device (Linux), which is visible in the Device Manager.

  2. Connect to the kit with a terminal emulator (for example, PuTTY). See How to connect with PuTTY for the required settings.

    The sample shows the following output:

    <inf> scan: Scan requested
Num  | SSID                             (len) | Chan | RSSI | Security | BSSID
1    | abcdef                           6     | 1    | -37  | WPA/WPA2 | aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa
2    | pqrst                            5     | 1    | -65  | WPA/WPA2 | xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
3    | AZBYCXD                          7     | 1    | -41  | WPA/WPA2 | yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:yy
<inf> scan: Scan request done