Thread protocol for outdoor sports accessories

[Mxoh]

Hi there,

We are a cycling accessories company (mainly light accessories) and have been using Nordic chips for BLE 1 to 1 connection of our helmet to phone (for configurations) and ESB/2.4GHz of our helmet to remote (for turn signals). As our company's direction is to produce more accessories and for them to be in a network, we have been researching and experimenting on this.

Frankly we are no experts and initially tried BLE mesh from our experience with BLE but found that the power consumption might be too high due to need for constant advertising and scanning. We came across Nordic BLE multi-link and planning to start some experiments with it soon but I am apprehensive as it is requires to define central and peripheral. My questions are:

1. Due to time constraint, we are likely still using BLE to create the network but I am wondering if there is possibly that in the future we would be able to support a supposedly better network protocol like Thread?

2. As our products are mainly outdoor accessories, we do not have a home network to tap into and rely on battery. I know that Zigbee requires a hub to be connected to a router but is there still a chance we can use Thread?

FYI we are currently using Nordic IC nRF52832 but have purchased Nordic nRF52840 with a development board router to experiment with Thread.

[Simonr]

Hi

I don't see why you would want or need a Thread network for the use case you've described here. How many devices do you want to be in a network exactly, and for what reason?

BLE will be the most power efficient solution I think, and the multi-link example is set to handle 8 peripherals by default, and should be able to handle up to 20 links. Do you want all devices to be connected to one central (like a phone), or are they all supposed to be connected together somehow? Can you try to explain what use case you would need them to be in a Thread type network for. 

One of the devices would still need to be a commissioner I think, and would draw quite a bit of current.

Best regards,

Simon

[Mxoh]

Hi Simonr,

Thanks for your response. In essence, we hope to create a smart "home" network that works outdoors. Right now, we produce smart helmets that can be configured through phone. It is a simple BLE point to point connection. The user sets up certain settings on the phone through the app and he is done. A critical configuration would be setting the 3 light modes. Light modes are light settings (flashing patterns in our case) that the user picked and he can cycle through them with the power button without the phone. 

On our roadmap, we have bicycle smart lights and perhaps even sensors/remotes/navigation devices. Below are 2 example networks:

Similarly, the phone would be primarily used to acknowledge that these devices belong to the same network and set the 3 light modes / flashing patterns. We hope that the phone do not need to be the central (only for configurations) and all devices be synced to correspond to the same light mode when cycling through and their flashing pattern would be flashing in sync as well. 

Frankly, we drew a lot of our technical inspiration from smart homes with most of them using Zigbee (but unsuitable in our case as it requires to be connected to a home router for WiFi to your phone) and came across Thread as an up and coming smart home protocol. We are super concerned about battery consumption and being able to work outdoors so want to explore all options that have this potential. 

The multi-link seems possible and 20 nodes should be more than sufficient for a bike scenario. But it seems like we have to pick one device as the central and the change of light modes where we press the power button to cycle through light modes can only be done through that central device. Let's say the central is down, would all the peripherals connected not work together?