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Wireless Mesh 4-20mA sensor

Wagner Caetano
26 days ago

Hi all.
I'd like to ask some direction about a product I want to develop.

My customer has some sensors distributed along his manufacturing plant and has plans to implement all equipments inside an automation project.
As could use a lot of sensors (4-20mA), instead buying a lot of analog input PLC cards maybe use BLE Mesh devices can reduce his costs for not buying PLC cards and infrastructure installations.
What I ask is, as nRF52 has BLE Mesh, Thread and Zigbee which protocol should I consider and why?
Consider I must use Siemens PLC's (S7-1200) to control his plant and equipments, which way could be implemented a gateway BLE Mesh to communicate to those PLC's?

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  • 25 days ago
    I mean, really you should pick the right tool for the job - and you can only really find that by minimizing the cost function given by your constraints.  So really you need to analyze your constraints.  These should include actual financial cost of materials, development time, development resources and training, etc etc.  However, all else being equal, if you have a network with at least several nodes, relatively small amounts of data per node, relatively low thoroughput constraints, and want the possibility of rapidly connecting to some existing commercial networks, then I've been under the impression that zigbee is the way to go.  See here: https://www.eetimes.com/bluetooth-thread-zigbee-mesh-compared/
    But of course, if delivery time is a major constraint, and all you have it a development team that knows ble mesh, then unless you can justify training them, (re)hiring new people, or hiring out the work (which is certainly possible if you think you'll make it back in business volume) then you might want to stick with what you know/have.
  • 25 days ago in reply to SmallerPond

    Very useful link.
    Zigbee was my first choice too.
    Now I take into the possibilitie to use BLE mesh.
    There a lot o things to evaluate.
    Developing a new device (BLE or Zigbee I don't know yet) or use off the shelf devices from big companies.
    Thanks
    Best Regards.

  • 24 days ago in reply to Wagner Caetano

    I thought Zigbee  was good in the industrial space as well, but most of those who could have used Zigbee have gone 802.15.4 +  proprietary stack instead of Zigbee. 

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