FloBLE+ roundtrip time

[BenjaminParticipant]

Hi,

I’ve been trying to improve the speed of our taps and it looks like a big barrier may be round-trip speed between my device and the FloBLE+ unit. For sending an escape sequence (which should be very fast as it doesn’t require the unit to do any NFC data transfer), I’m seeing about 150ms elapse between transmitting the escape sequence and receiving the response.

Obviously if we’re actually sending escape sequences we don’t need to wait for the response, but in reality we need to do a few different reads from the cards, and I’d rather not wait an extra 150ms per read–that adds up fast!

Is this expected behavior? Is there any way to mitigate it?

EDIT: the hardware is a fairly low-end Android tablet.

• This topic was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by  Benjamin.

[ScottKeymaster]

Hi Benjamin,
Escape commands are usually just for configuring the reader. Once the reader is configured, sending only regular APDUs should remove the latency. Does this answer your question?

Scott

[BenjaminParticipant]

Sorry, the escape sequences were just an example. I’ve never sent the reader a command (including escape sequences, APDUs and other SDK methods) that took less than 150ms from the time I sent the command, to the time the event listener fired.

[BenjaminParticipant]

Hi Scott, do you have any updates on this? I’ve run into some scenarios where I need to send commands quickly and this latency is killing me; I have a USB reader that is actually working much better because of the lower latency.

[RichardKeymaster]

Hi Benjamin, the FloBLE has BLE connection events set at 100ms so this may be why you’re seeing of the order of 150ms per APDU execution. Can you share the sequence that you are sending with your USB reader along with time stamps?? We can investigate optimizing the firmware and Flomio SDK to achieve lower latency but this will impact battery life. Having a benchmark will allow us to quickly assess what’s possible.

best,
Richard

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