Low Power Node Support in Nordic BLE mesh

[Charile]

I'd like to use the nrf52832 as a mesh switch with battery powered. But I didn't find any sample code for the Low power feature in current mesh SDK v0.10.1. Does it support this feature now?

And does the light node support the friend feature?

[endnode]

The nRF52 chip has basically three modes of MCU core when it comes to power: POWER ON, POWER ON SLEEP and POWER OFF. Now all Nordic example FWs are using POWER ON SLEEP whenever chip has nothing to process (only peripheral blocks do what they are programmed for through the registers but nothing needs to be computed - e.g. RTC timer is running etc.) and system just waits for interrupt/event. Now that's pretty much all you can get for operation when you need to have any HW peripheral running! POWER OFF is useful only if you will get wake-up by external signal such as GPIO pulse (button) or NFC field (if you have it implemented). So this is not really useful for mesh node.

Conclusion: all the examples supplied by Nordic should already consume as few power as possible by the HW platform.

[Charile]

Thanks endnode,

I understood Nordic had improved the power consumption on MCU side. But I wonder if Nordic BLE mesh stack had implemented corresponding message protocol between the low power node and Friend node, such as low power establishment, the polling mechanism,friend Queue and so on, which defined in mesh profile 3.6.6.3 and 3.6.6.4.

I want to use a remote to control both the battery powered devices and DC powered devices. The battery powered devices need receive the message in low power mode. So I am considering the mesh low power node is appropriate for this use scenario. If Nordic HAS implemented this feature, please give me some references.

[endnode]

Oh sorry, I misunderstood the question as general low power capabilities of the platform not as feature of BT SIG mesh! I guess clarifying the question helps;) I hope someone will reply soon;)

[John]

After spending considerable time reading the Mesh documentation, without wishing to appear too ignorant, wouldn't it be a bad move to try and implement a pseudo friend relationship within the mesh?

Surely it would be preferable to do it properly and I'm assuming that a low power device would also be asked to join the mesh and be given appropriate keys in order to establish it's relationship with other devices. I further assume that the low power device would encrypt it's data, so like others that have been asking the same question, I'm reluctant to try and create a temporary integration to the mesh which should and probably will at some stage need to be replaced.