Now that we’ve covered the basics of Bluetooth mesh and also gone over how to run a simple example on the nRF52 platform, it’s time for us to dig deeper into the source code of each type of device/node involved in a mesh network. If you missed the previous posts in this series, you can find them all here: Bluetooth mesh tutorial (part 1): covering the basics as well as some of the different terminologies such as Nodes, Elements, States, Properties, Messages, Addresses, Publish/Subscribe, and Managed Flooding. Bluetooth mesh tutorial (part 2): covering terminologies such as Models, Scenes, Relay nodes, Proxy nodes, Friend nodes, Low power nodes, and the architecture of Bluetooth mesh. Bluetooth mesh tutorial (part 3): covering the concept of Provisioning and how security is handled in Bluetooth mesh. Bluetooth mesh tutorial (part 4): covering the…

In the last post in this series on Bluetooth mesh (found here), we provided a high-level overview of the nRF5 SDK for Bluetooth mesh. We also listed the different examples provided as part of the Nordic SDK. The most complete of these examples is the lighting example, and this is the one we’ll go forward with demoing and explaining. In this week’s post, we’ll go over building and running this example and understanding the different parts within it. In the upcoming posts, we’ll get into the details of the source code for each device. Here’s a diagram showing the network and the devices we’ll be using within it:   Hardware and Software Requirements The different hardware devices required in this example include: Two nRF52 boards…

This week we will continue our tutorial series on Bluetooth mesh. Here’s where you can find part 1, part 2, and part 3. But before we get into the practical implementation of an example on the nRF52 series platform, let’s better understand how Bluetooth mesh works on the platform. We’ll go over: The basics and architecture of the nRF5 SDK for Mesh How to install and configure the SDK Which development boards are compatible nRF5 SDK for Mesh Architecture Overview The goal of an SDK is to provide the developer with a set of APIs to make implementation easier and abstract out any unnecessary complexities in the underlying stack. Here’s a diagram showing the architecture of the nRF5 SDK for Mesh: Let’s go through each of the…

In this post, we’re continuing our tutorial series on Bluetooth mesh (you can find part 1 here and part 2 here). This will be the final post that will cover “theory only” content — in the upcoming posts we’ll start digging into more practice by implementing a Bluetooth mesh example on the Nordic nRF52 series platform. In this post, we’ll be covering the provisioning process as well as how security is handled in Bluetooth mesh. The Provisioning Process The provisioning process is one of the most important concepts in Bluetooth mesh. It is used for adding devices to the mesh network. A device that gets added to the network is called a node, and the device used to add a node to the network is called…