Bluetooth 5 Mesh using nRF52840, any demo video present and what hardware and software I need

[Deepak]

Hi,

We have a set of connected devices in a building of around 22 floors, may be around 6000 devices, can it connected using a nRF52840 Mesh network? Please let me know. Data transmitted would be around few bytes every couple of seconds from each device.

I need to create a demo for my cusotmer with couple of simple sensors like temperature, light along with 4-5 nRF52840 devices and demonstrate the Bluetooth 5 Mesh and connected to a Mobile device with bluetooth 5 support. What would be the Hardware components needed to build this and Software SDK. I see nRF SDK with Thread to support Mesh, is Thread to be used or some other option. Would I need need 4-5 development boards as to combination of nRF52840 SoC and nRF52840 development board?

Can someone please give some insight to it on the latest stuff available? Please let me know your view.

Thanks and Regards Deepak

[Petter Myhre]

You should be able to use Bluetooth Mesh, but 6000 nodes is a lot. The theoretical limit is 32000 nodes, but how well the mesh will behave depends on the traffic. Your throughput requirements are not too high, but it will still be a lot of traffic with that many nodes.

At the moment the Bluetooth Mesh SDK does not support (but is compatible with) nRF52840 as you can see here.

Sounds like the Light control demo could be a good starting point for you. For that you need 4 kits, as you can see under hardware requirements, but it shouldnt' be to hard to modify the example to support more servers.

Currently, we do not have any mobile app example that works with either Bluetooth Mesh or Thread, sorry.

You might be able to use Thread as well, but then you have to split the nodes into different networks.

Each network can only have 32 routers, and then the rest of the nodes has to be end devices that are only connected to one router. A thread network is said to support up to 250 nodes in total.

If you want to use thread you have to use nrf52840, as you can see here.

[Deepak]

Thanks Petter, that was pretty good response, covers all aspects.

We definitely need more that 250 nodes, Thread has a a limitation, probably adding up more border routers may resolve connecting more nodes.

On Bluetooth Mesh When is the support for Bluetooth Mesh SDK for nrf52840 anticipated formally, I am assuming, we can still use it as it is compatible and works. Can u please let me know the recommended nodes supported on Bluetooth Mesh using nrf52840 and what could be the ideal Network System configuration considering number of Routers/Bluetooth 5 IoT gateways for connecting 7000 nodes? I need to send data from the 7000 nodes to out IoT Cloud platform. I am assuming that Bluetooth 5 Mesh network can achieve this. Or would you recommend Zigbee Mesh for this? Kindly clarify.