Bluetooth Mesh

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2017-01-19 by KenOgami

Can the puck be re-flashed with firmware that supports Bluetooth Mesh?

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2017-01-19 by @gfwilliams

Yes, it can. But there is currently no Bluetooth Mesh firmware for it so you'd have to make it first :)

Also: Meshing tends to hurt battery life quite a lot, so with a meshing firmware the CR2032 battery wouldn't keep Puckjs running for that long.

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2017-01-19 by KenOgami

Actually, the spec includes a low power node specifically to address this issue. For low power nodes, there is no obligation to re-transmit messages and participate in the mesh network at that level. Low power nodes only need to react and send messages specific to the node. So the additional code for mesh primarily deals with the node provisioning and handling messages at the higher layers of the spec.

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2017-01-24 by KenOgami

Since the Espruino uses a Nordic chip, I am sure that Nordic will or already has code that supports mesh. Can Espruino provide a binary that can be loaded to the puck?

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2017-01-25 by @gfwilliams

I doubt it's as easy as just recompiling with their code - for instance we'd need to add a new API that handled the communications over the mesh network.

But it could definitely be done. I'm afraid it'd not something that's on my roadmap at the moment though - IPv6 takes priority right now.

If you desperately needed it then potentially you could pay for my time taken to port it, or as it's Open Source you could have a go at doing it yourself.

It's also worth noting that if you're ok with creating other Bluetooth Mesh nodes, you could program those nodes to talk to completely standard Puck.js devices based on commands they received over the mesh network.

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2017-01-27 by KenOgami

I'm looking into what Nordic has and what functionality it takes care of. I can then give you an idea of what additional APIs the puck would need to support Bluetooth mesh. I am also looking at using an Arduino as an additional node in the network to interface with the puck. There still needs to be some additional code on the puck to negotiate the mesh due to security etc. It may be that all of this is taken care of by the Nordic code and minimal APIs on the puck side are needed.