I have an existing system for my elderly mother based on a nRF52832 puck ( www.espruino.com/Puck.js ) that includes the button-press-count in its advertising data. When the button is pressed, the count goes up.
There is a raspberry pi with a gateway type software that listens to advertising and coverts to MQTT where some Node-Red logic then does some SMS notifications to her children. My Mom doesn't want a commercial system with professional monitoring that would call emergency services. Anyone with elderly parents might recognize this.... she would rather die than be embarrassed 
. SMS to her children on a button press is cool with her. I have even had other folks ask me about using it for their parents.
This architecture kind of works OK but the positioning of the raspberry pi and my mother's location in the house sometimes leads to advertising packets not being processed.
I would like to use multiple full power devices to more reliably capture the low power advertising packets. I would like to reuse the existing pucks I have even though they are not IEEE 802.15.4 capable. I have four or five already and, frankly, with the supply chain challenges getting new pucks with newer SoCs is hard to find.
--- Background Research I Have Done ----
- Purchased three nrf52840dk and one nrf5340dk devices and also some Thingy:52 devices (before I realized they have have SoCs that are not compatible with the newer mesh designs)
- Tinkered with the nrf Connect SDK 1.8, 1.9 and 1.9.1
- Bluetooth Mesh Samples - these work fine but I have not been able to punch out of the BT bubble to interact with the IP world and Node-Red
- OpenThread Samples - these work fine but I would need to figure out the best way to get the non-thread nrf52832 advertising to be captured by the Thread nodes using what I would suspect would be the multi-protocol features of the newer SoCs. I'm using the OTBR on Pi and the nrf52840 dongle.
- Matter/CHIP - I could never get the Chip-Tool on Raspberry Pi to work for me. The pariing always seems to time out and fail. I have some tickets on github but am not making much progress there. There do seem to be others with problems on the Pi not making progress. Isn't the Matter project mature enough?
--- Design to Migrate To ---
I'm thinking of (2) for now. Does anyone have any suggestions?
By the way, I asked before but didn't hear back... Is there a forum where my type of question would be more appropriate?
