Mesh with bi-direction communication

[kian79]

Hi all,

I have an application where I have a mobile app  that communicate with up to 20 BLE devices. The BLE devices are RGB LED lights with push buttons and a sensor. I want to be able to from the mobile app, send a code to turn on and set the color of 1 or more of these lights. Also, when the button on the light is pressed, it needs to send the sensor value to the app.

May I know what is the best method to implement this and how to get started? Will the Mesh Serial example or SDK UART coexistance example work?

Thanks in advance.

[Hung Bui]

Hi,

What is the distance between devices and to the phone ? If it's in the RF range with the phone, you don't really Mesh. Our BLE softdevice support up to 20 concurrent links. 

If mesh is needed, your application is pretty similar to this demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XthbU9NP0Yg

 The source code is provided here: https://github.com/NordicPlayground/thingy52-mesh-provisioning-demo

It can be configured with our nRF mesh app. 

Of course you would need to modify the app and firmware to customize for your application, but it's a good place to start with. 

[kian79]

Hi Hung Bui,

Thank you for the reply. I am only looking at a range of about 50m or less. You mention that the Nordic softdevice supports up to 20 concurrent links. Is this supported by any mobile phone that has BLE? Or different models of phones or mobile OS will affect the number of concurrent links?

Does this then mean that I can have each of these devices running ble_app_uart and have the phone connected to all 20 of them at the same time and exchange information?

[kian79]

Hi Hung Bui,

I like to further feedback that the program for ble_peripheral is not working too for pca10040. I like to compile and download the codes onto a Nordic Thingy. I am trying to compile the ble_peripheral project for pca10040 on SES and I am getting this error:

C:\NordicSemi\nRF5_SDK_15.2.0\examples\components\libraries\log\src\nrf_log_backend_rtt.c: No such file or directory

I figured that the components directory is referenced wrongly in the project properties. So rather than changing the user directory in project options -> preprocessor, I just copied and paste the components directory inside the examples directory. I tried compiling again and I am getting another error:

compiler_abstraction.h: No such file or directory

I am not sure how to fix this and if there will be more errors after fixing this. Can Nordic also help to check and fix this project?

I am using SES with the latest SDK15.2 downloaded from Nordic.

[Hung Bui]

Hi Kian, 

I'm so sorry for that. I got the developer updated the project. Please try again. 

[Vroon]

Hello Hung Bui,

I checked the update, but I guess PCA10040 still isn't supported. Any idea how to go on about this? I'm having the same issues as Kian.

[Hung Bui]

Which issue did you have ? I tried here and it worked for me. 

[kian79]

Thanks Hung Bui. I got this to work already. But I have other questions about the multi-link-multi-role demo. I will start another thread with more specific questions.