Does any softdevice support Mesh, per BLE5?

[Mitch996]

Hello, I'm pretty sure the new BLE 5 will come out soon and it will integrate the mesh. And if mesh needs to be done at a protocol level, it must be the softdevice.

So, any softdevice so far support mesh? Or at least, any plans?

I'm usre nrf52840 support BLE5.

[Mitch996]

@endnode

sending a pigeon would be faster and more reliable

What? Have you tried these?

github.com/.../nRF51-ble-bcast-mesh

What do you think about it?

[endnode]

This would be for week-long work shop and not discussion over the forum, but we have evaluated like one year ago 5-10 low-power mesh network solutions, closed source/open source, BLE based/2.4GHz proprietary/sub-GHz and once you bring it to office floor full of people, machines, WiFi and other noise suddenly nothing was usable for our purpose. Yes, if you have Wirepas network in urban area and you want to read water meter state once a day (so you don't care if you get the value now or in 5 minutes or in 2 hours) then it's OK. If you want to get information (hundreds of bytes) over several hops reliably within seconds not minutes nothing worked for us. I hope these solutions are evolving so it will get better but things we have tried were under heavy development for 3+ years so I don't expect magic happening since then.

[endnode]

So my question is opposite: have you achieved good latency in real environment (!= 3 dev kits on your lab test bench!) with any of these mesh technologies? If yes I would very eagerly learn the details!

[Mitch996]

@ endnode

So I take it you didn't really look into that github project I mentioned... doesn't matter.

Anyway, latency? At this point I don't really care because like you said I'm using it for the water meter kind of application... so yea, 2 hours maybe a problem, or even 10 minutes, but 5? Not really at this point, I don't know if things will move toward the demanding direction.

So far I got a 10 nodes network working in a "clean" environment, meaning little wifi and other stuff and the latency is acceptable (<30s usually, my methods are quite primitive), I'm migrating it to another platform right after I can propagate short messages through out the network. Because of the hasty migration, I don't have time to do a more in-depth gathering of all specs.

[Mitch996]

Funny in the symposium I participated the BT people made it sound like BLE is the super communication apparatus free from all the interference especially wifi, with all the frequency hopping etc.