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Gazell, ANT or ..other ?

Antonio

Hello we would like to use the Nordic chip to send wireless messages from a node to other nodes directly,without hubs. We wouldn't like to be limited to up to 8 nodes receiving the message. All the chain of nodes can propagate the message to other nodes depending on the message ( mesh network ). We are also wondering if it is possible to be sure to send a physical message in particular moment of time, I mean to bind the sending to a timer for example. What is the best solution for this ? I read Gazelle has a limitation to up to 8 nodes and it is thought mainly for desktop applications like mouse, keyboards, etc. I am not sure ANT is the right solution for this. is it possible otherwise to use the radio peripheral for the whole our own proprietary protocol implementation? what are the limitations in this case ? I think the right choice for this is ANT , can you confirm this ?

  • 0

    For BLE we have a rebroadcasting mesh implementation available here. There are some questions with some more information on this forum.

    For ANT I'm not aware of any application note or example for mesh. However it shouldn't be to hard to implement an ANT node to relay data, which is necessary to create a "practical" mesh network.

    For instance node A can setup a broadcast channel, node B can setup a receive channel and a broadcast channel, and node C can setup a receive channel. The synchronization, power management and pairing between A and B, B and C is fully handled by ANT.

    However the application in each node will need to setup individual channels, and specifically node B will need to take the receive channel data from node A and write the data to its broadcast channel (this is very easy to do). Data on a broadcast channel can then be received by anyone on the same network.

    The challenge here will be to inform node B that it should start to look for node A, if node C cannot receive data from node A directly.

    However this might not be very difficult. For instance node C can by default be setup to try to receive data from node A, if no data is received within reasonable time node C can instead setup a broadcast channel to request anyone nearby to try to search for node A.

    This can then be received by node B that by default has a receive channel open, then node B will setup a second receive channel to search for node A, once node B acquire node A, it can inform node C that it has found node A by sending data on the reverse channel back to node C. Since all channels are bidirectional this is straight forward.

    Each node can setup up to 8 ANT channels, which can be a combination of receiver and broadcaster channels.

    Edit 23.05.2016: ANT SoftDevices now support up to 15 channels.

  • 0 in reply to Petter Myhre

    thank you very much for your answer, we will try these solutions

  • 0 in reply to Petter Myhre

    Hi again, do you think if we use the ANT solution, can we use simultaneously ANT mesh as you described and BLE Ibeacon advertising by the help of the S310 SoftDevice?

  • 0 in reply to Petter Myhre

    I haven't tested it, but I believe it should be possible.

  • 0 in reply to Petter Myhre

    with the ANT solution can we do pairing of the boards without assinging to the boards different roles, like master or slave ?we would like to do an ANT network automatically, without commissioning stage assigning different roles to the boards.is this possible with ANT ?

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