Low power remote control

RE: Low power remote control

Bjørn Kvaale — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 14:03:46 GMT

Sorry for the delayed response. This case was marked as "Verified Answer", which unfortunately made it impossible for me to see in my case list.

See this link regarding Bluetooth security. That will give you a good intro to the different security options.

RE: Low power remote control

TYRI — Thu, 21 Jun 2018 13:22:47 GMT

Thank you for a quick and elaborate response!

If we'd go with scenario 1, I suppose we'd need some way to secure and isolate our custom BLE communication (the low power remote control should still be tied to a mesh, albeit not as a BT mesh node, and shouldn't be able to control devices belonging to any other mesh).

Do you have any suggestions here? I could imagine something based on the same security keys that are used in the BT mesh messages (NetKey etc.)

Thank you for suggesting other examples, but we're pretty set on using Bluetooth mesh since the standard allows for future extensions of our product portfolio and possibly easier interoperation with external systems.

RE: Low power remote control

Bjørn Kvaale — Thu, 21 Jun 2018 11:39:46 GMT

I would go with scenario 1, custom GAP/GATT solution. We already have the proxy node example here as a part of the light switch example, which you could base your mesh network off of.

1a) Why would GATT be too slow? I believe you could just increase the connection interval to speed up the communication between the proxy mesh node & the remote control.

1b) Bluetooth Mesh uses the PB-ADV bearer to communicate between the different nodes in the mesh network. As far as I understand, David did not mean GAP or GATT based communication, but both. GAP takes care of discovery, connection & link management in a BLE link, whereas GATT says how you can package, show & send data over BLE. See this link for more info regarding this.

2) Regular Bluetooth Mesh nodes should not be battery powered, as the radio needs to be on for most of the time to listen for new mesh messages from other nodes.

3a) This could be done pretty quickly as far as I am aware. You can set the connection supervision timeout in most sdk examples, which is the time until the link between a BLE central & peripheral is considered lost.

If you are in this situation, you would need to store all of the messages that have not been sent to the low power node in all friend nodes I guess. I am not sure if the Bluetooth Mesh spec says anything about this.

3b) I will send you a private message regarding this.

4) You could take a look at the multilink example if you do not need a mesh network. I have often noticed that customers will want to use a mesh network for a certain application, yet the multilink example would work just as well for the application. In my opinion, it may also be a bit easier to understand.