User's Manual

Table Of Contents

CATC MERLIN MOBILE 1.00 CHAPTER 1

User’s Manual Merlin Mobile Overview

DRAFT

CHAPTER 1: MERLIN MOBILE

VERVIEW

The CATC™ Merlin Mobile™ Bluetooth™ Protocol Analyzer blends powerful piconet

traffic recording and analysis abilities with compact, easily transportable PC Card

technology. Merlin Mobile is a development and test tool for products using the Bluetooth

wireless technology. Merlin Mobile non-intrusively monitors piconet traffic and records and

displays captured Bluetooth data.

Like its predecessor, the CATC Merlin™ Bluetooth Protocol Analyzer, Merlin Mobile uses

CATC's BusEngine™ technology, which incorporates a real-time recording engine with

programmable data, state, and error detection, and event triggering, filtering, counting, and

sequencing. This enables users to optimize recording memory usage to capture the data that

is most important.

The Merlin Mobile system consists of the analyzer hardware unit and the analyzer software.

The Merlin Mobile analyzer unit monitors and captures baseband packets on a piconet in a

non-intrusive manner. The packets can then be viewed and decoded with Merlin Mobile

software. The software displays the piconet data in CATC Trace™ format and is capable of

decoding and organizing the data for these Bluetooth protocol levels: LMP, L2CAP, SDP,

TCS, RFCOMM, OBEX, AT, HDLC, PPP, BNEP, and HID. In addition, users can use the

CATC Scripting Language to create custom decoders for specific development purposes.

The Merlin Mobile analyzer unit is configured and controlled by the analyzer software. It

can be used with portable computers for field service and maintenance, as well as with

desktop units in a development environment. Furthermore, Merlin Mobile Automation™

and compatibility with the CATC Merlin's Wand™ Bluetooth Test Generator provide the

capability for creating a fully-automated testing environment.

The Merlin Mobile analyzer includes provisions for on-the-fly detection of, and triggering

on, numerous events. Such events include specific packet headers, payload headers, data

patterns, and many abnormal (error) traffic conditions. Merlin Mobile continuously records

the piconet data in a wrap-around fashion until it is manually stopped or until the trigger

event is detected. Upon detection of a triggering event, the analyzer continues, as necessary,

to record data until the recording buffer is filled.

The Merlin Mobile application may be used with or without the analyzer box. When used

without the analyzer box, it functions as a Trace™ viewer. As a Trace viewer, it can be used

to view, analyze and print CATC Trace files.

1.1 Bluetooth Specification

Please refer to the Bluetooth Specification, version 1.1, for details on the Bluetooth wireless

technology protocol. The Bluetooth Specification is available from the Bluetooth SIG at its

web site: http://www.bluetooth.com.