ZigBee network on nrf52840.

[bilal337]

Hi,
we have a custom board developed based on thing91 which has nrf52840 and nrf9160.
we are planning to use nrf52840 as zigbee cordinator and connected nrf9160 over uart will be used for sending and receiving data from aws server and all of the end devices will be connected with nrf52840 in zigbee mesh network. end devices can be of different/same types and they will have different data.
what we are planning is to receive/send data to end devices and process them on nrf52840 and feed the data to our own custom uart driver for nrf52 and nrf91 communication as we need to have separate topic structure for each device type/device id. all of the end device will consist of some sensor connected with nrf52840.

1. Can you suggest if we can achieve that with zigbee MESH ?
2. is there any range constraint for zigbee mesh? 
3. any particular suggestion about UART driver? how can we maintain data integrity ?we are following the uart example. what modification we would need as well in that?
4. in later stages we want to perform ota through nrf9160 -> nrf52840 (over uart) and then firmware file to particular end_device to upgrade(over zigbee).can you suggest some good solutions?

Any help is much appreciated. 
Thanks 

[Edvin]

Hello,

First of all, I am sorry for the late reply. 

I think you should look into the Zigbee Shell sample. This does pretty much what you want to do, apart from the FOTA, which is currently not possible to do from an nRF device (from what we provide). It should, however, be possible to implement. But it is currently not something that we provide.

So to answer your questions:

1: I would say.

2. No, not other than the number of routers, and all nodes need to be in range of at least one router. You will however not be able to reach the theoretical maximum of something like 64000 nodes, due to memory constraints. The amount of nodes you can have depends on what features the different nodes have.

3: Look at the zigbee shell sample.

4: As mentioned, we don't have any solution for this, but we did back in the old, "legacy" nRF5 SDK. I am not sure whether or not we will add support for this in NCS.

Best regards,

Edvin