Question about technical information of nrf52832 and others

[TechOasisIntl]

Hello,

I'm a computer engineer of Tech Oasis. We are working on a lighting and power entry modules, and I find your product, such as nRF52832, meets our requirements. After my research on your product and company, I have some detailed technical question about your product:

1. Does the product support building up a mesh network? If not, do you have any product that supports that function through BLE or wifi?
2. If you can set up a network, what is the maximum of nodes being supported?
3. Is a kit available for development and is reference design is available?
4. We need the device to have the abilities to turn on/off the device, change the brightness of the light and be able to exchange information between control device and nodes, the exchange should be in both ways. What are the type of APIs available? If you don't have these functions, is that possible for us to develop our own set of commands?
5. Is a kit available for development and is reference design is available?
6. What type of tools required to test wireless messaging?
7. How long has the company being doing this technology and how is the support? And is the support via online or live person or local support?
8. How could the network be established in a secure manner?

Thank you very much!

[Einar Thorsrud]

I will attempt to answer your questions one by one.

1. The nRF OpenMesh is a BLE mesh network for our nRF5x products that you may want to consider.

2. For the mesh network you can have a very high number of nodes (I would have to check what the maximum number is, but I doubt it has practical implications). If you were to have a star network topology (1 central and several peripherals), this would be limited to 8 peripheral nodes with the current SoftDevice. This is a SoftDevice limitation though, so it might change in future releases.

3. The nRF52 DK is the best kit to obtain in order to start developing with the nRF52.

4. The functions you describe seems to be very application specific, and is something you would implement in your firmware. I see no reason why it should not be possible.

5. See 3.

6. For developing and prototyping you would typically use an extra development kit in order to use the nRF Connect. There are also a number of other tools that could be useful, in various stages of development. I recommend you to go through the nRF5 Getting Started and the DK documentation in order to get an overview.

7. Nordic has been working on ultra-low power wireless devices for over a decade, and been in existence for more than three decades. I recommend you to look at the Wikipedia article if you are interested in more history. Nordic is currently the market leader when it comes to Bluetooth LE/Smart SoC's. Regarding the support, Nordic strives to provide excellent support to all customers and potential customers. For general questions we recommend customers to use this forum. For product specific questions that you do not want public, we have a closed support portal were you can ask questions that you do not want to be public. If you require onsite support that may be possible in some situations, but you should talk to your regional sales manager or FAE for more details on that. (Send me a PM if you need contact information for your regional sales manager).

8. There are a number of security features in BLE. In general, the nRF OpenMesh does not have security, but you can probably build that in the application layer. If you use a standardized BLE network solution, we support most of the relevant parts of the BLE spec. This LE Security article describes the basics of security in BLE.

As it seems to me that you are early in the process of evaluation which product you need, I recommend you to contact sales in order to get more information.