Large scale Bluetooth mesh network (hundreds of nodes)

Question

Hello, 
 In my quest to monitor the activity of hundreds of nodes (directly addressable), I am facing quite an obstacle. 
 The small memory of the nrf52 (nice piece of hardware btw) in a light-switch like configuration only allows for 50 nodes with persistent storage and 150 without it. 
 Would it be possible to offload the configuration and "client" role to a PC in order to allow for a bigger network (several hundreds of nodes) ? 
 I have been looking at the serial example, but I can hardly imagine the difficulty and time to port all the configuration and other model complexity on a PC/python program. 
 Thank you, 
 Max

Susheel Nuguru · Accepted Answer

Hi Maximo, 
 Both your approach will accomplish what you are trying to do, but the easy way will get more complicated for the client if you intend to increase the number of nodes in your system. Since the client is connected to PC, one good thing is that we do not have to think about its power consumption. 
 If I were you, I would have chosen the harder one, to make the solution future proof. I see no disadvantages of this mention.

Max · Answer

Thanks a lot for the answer. 
 I figured out the hard way ahah.. What I will do is the following: 
 Since my goal is to have a +200 nodes/sensors and only one client (the node connected to my computer ), I will try to create a protocol on the top of the beacon one. that way each beaconing node will beacon their sensor info every 20 seconds (or so) . The data will be eventually caught by my PC node. I'll be able to recognize each of them with their address . and in order to address each of these node with my PC node, I may have 2 options: 
 The easy one: send a beacon from my PC node with the address of the node in it, that way the destination node will recognize that the message is for he r. ("node" is a female word in French :) ) 
 The harder one: add remote provisioning, and provision one remote node at the time to have a dual way connection, send my message, and remove the connection (since I cannot keep more that 60 nodes provision info in the RAM). 
 Could you please let me know what do you think about this solution ? 
 Thanks again.

Large scale Bluetooth mesh network (hundreds of nodes)

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