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…

In last week’s tutorial (The Ultimate Bluetooth Mesh Tutorial (Part 1)) in this series on Bluetooth mesh, we covered the following: Basics of Bluetooth mesh Terminology: nodes, elements, states, properties, messages, addresses, publish-subscribe, and managed flooding. In this week’s tutorial, we’ll continue by covering a few more concepts within Bluetooth mesh, including: Models Scenes Types of nodes: Relay nodes Proxy nodes Friend nodes Low power nodes The architecture of Bluetooth mesh Let’s go through each of these in more detail. Models One important term defined in Bluetooth mesh is the concept of a model. A model defines some or all functionality of a given element. There are three categories of models: Server model: is a collection of states, state transitions, state bindings, and messages which…

Bluetooth has been around for a while. In fact, it recently it celebrated its 20th year anniversary! The introduction of the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) standard came in 2010 to address the rapid growth of use cases in the Internet of Things (IoT) field including sensors, wearables, medical devices, etc. However, one thing that BLE lacked since the beginning was the capability of supporting a many-to-many topology (often referred to as mesh), where multiple BLE devices can send each other messages and relay messages to other devices within a network. This all changed in July 2017 when the Bluetooth SIG released the Bluetooth mesh standard. We’ll be going over the most important basics you need to know to better understand Bluetooth mesh and how it works.…