Tomas McGuinness

As part of my Temperature Sensor upgrade, I’ve started looking into Mesh Networking support.

I was aware that the Expressif ESP32 supports the new Bluetooth LE Mesh protocol, and as Bluetooth Low Energy would help stretch battery life, it seemed like the natural place to start my investigations.

I was initially going to try the WiFi mesh, but it didn’t really seem to suit devices like temperature sensor as they are actually asleep most of the time. If nodes in the mesh keep turning on and off, the other devices in the mesh would be constantly reorganizing themselves to plug the gaps. I do want to learn about ESP’s WiFi mesh, but for now, I’ll focus on Bluetooth

Documenting my progress

Rather than try and put a post together at the end, I’m going to try and document my progress as I go, with additions to this post each time I do something significant.

Getting started

I’ve already got the ESP-IDF environment setup and have two different dev boards. I’m going to try and approach this in stages

• Copy one of the sample projects and get it running
• Add another node
• Send data from one node to another
• Add MQTT and WiFi to get data out of the mesh

9th July 2019

I pulled down the ESP-IDF code from their mesh branch and spun up on the samples. After faffing around with the menuconfig settings, I got the Node example compiled and deployed onto the device. It also appeared appeared in the Nordic iOS Mesh App.

I found a good post on the provisioning process, https://www.novelbits.io/bluetooth-mesh-tutorial-part-3/ and this helped me make sense of what I was seeing.

Once I tapped on the node, I was able to tap “Identify”, which pulled back more information. I think this is what novelbits called “Invitation”. I then tapped “Provision” and after a few seconds, and a lot of logging from the device, I had the first Node in my mesh!

11th July

Now that I had my first mesh node, I quickly realised why the Expressif code was only at version 0.6 – none of the provisioning data was being saved. This meant that each time I flashed the device, I had to provision it again. This became annoying after the fifth time, so I started digging into the actual provisioning process, to see if I could put in something temporary.

I was digging around on google and I came across the Zephyr RTOS. In their examples, they had a simple 2 node mesh demo. The readme page states that no provisioning is required, and whilst it’s insecure, it’s sufficient for the demo. In their code, I could see a few lines of code where they manually provision the device with their own network and device keys.

static const u8_t net_key[16] = {
	0x01, 0x23, 0x45, 0x67, 0x89, 0xab, 0xcd, 0xef,
	0x01, 0x23, 0x45, 0x67, 0x89, 0xab, 0xcd, 0xef,
};
static const u8_t dev_key[16] = {
	0x01, 0x23, 0x45, 0x67, 0x89, 0xab, 0xcd, 0xef,
	0x01, 0x23, 0x45, 0x67, 0x89, 0xab, 0xcd, 0xef,
};
static const u8_t app_key[16] = {
	0x01, 0x23, 0x45, 0x67, 0x89, 0xab, 0xcd, 0xef,
	0x01, 0x23, 0x45, 0x67, 0x89, 0xab, 0xcd, 0xef,
};

err = bt_mesh_provision(net_key, net_idx, flags, iv_index, addr, dev_key);

This seemed ideal for my tinkering. I also found reference to the Zephyr code in Expressif’s news release about their BLE Mesh, where they state they are basing their implementation on top of the Zephyr . This meant I could probably find simple code in the esp-idf repo.

Running this code on the device resulted in it saying that provisioning was complete.

19th July

After more digging around the ESP-IDF examples, I came across some testing code, which appeared to provision using the esp code.

bt_mesh_device_auto_enter_network()

Try as I might, I couldn’t get that to work. Just kept reporting an error of -22.

UPDATE 13th August: During some experimenting with how to bridge the mesh network with MQTT, I managed to get this code working eventually, meaning:

static const u16_t net_idx;
static const u16_t app_idx;
static const u32_t iv_index;

struct bt_mesh_device_network_info info = {
        .net_key = { 
                    0x01,
                    0x23,
                    0x45,
                    0x67,
                    0x89,
                    0xab,
                    0xcd,
                    0xef,
                    0x01,
                    0x23,
                    0x45,
                    0x67,
                    0x89,
                    0xab,
                    0xcd,
                    0xef,
                    },
        .net_idx = net_idx,
        .flags = flags,
        .iv_index = iv_index,
        .unicast_addr = 0x0002,
        .dev_key = {
                    0x01,
                    0x23,
                    0x45,
                    0x67,
                    0x89,
                    0xab,
                    0xcd,
                    0xef,
                    0x01,
                    0x23,
                    0x45,
                    0x67,
                    0x89,
                    0xab,
                    0xcd,
                    0xef,
        },
        .app_key = {
		0x01,
		0x23,
		0x45,
		0x67,
		0x89,
		0xab,
		0xcd,
		0xef,
		0x01,
		0x23,
		0x45,
		0x67,
		0x89,
		0xab,
		0xcd,
		0xef,
},
        .app_idx = app_idx,
        .group_addr = 0xc000
    };

    err = bt_mesh_device_auto_enter_network(&info);

20th July

After more attempts to provision the device directly, I’ve decided to kinda give up. As I mentioned, the Zephyr code is easier for me to understand at this stage, so I’m going to try and get a build of the Zephyr samples running on my ESP32 boards.

23rd July

After hours of playing around trying to get the Zephyr SDK compiling against the ESP32 toolchain, I decided to stop. I found an excellent resource at over on the Bluetooth SIG website, called “An Introduction to Bluetooth Mesh Networking“. The samples in their course use the Zephyr SDK and the BBC Microbit. I had a glance though it and most of the main concepts are covered, so I think I’ll order some BBC Microbits and run through it.

I also came across an interest post at https://hutscape.com/, which is worth checking out. The author, Sayanee, uses an Adafruit board to build a UV sensor. Pretty cool. At £26 (and no Friend Node support in the Nordic SDK), I decided against buying any for the time being.

24th July

I got a BBC Microbit and tried the Zephyr mesh_demo code. After more mucking around, I managed to flash it with their code.

As suggested by the Bluetooth study guide, I turned on the logging and then

The damn firmware, with logging, was too big for the BBC Microbit’s 16KB of ram. Bloody hell. Nothing is every easy. Some googling revealed that the small amount of SRAM makes it almost impossible to run the mesh. The Apollo Computer ran on 4KB of RAM 🙂

Hardware development is tough! That said, these microbits are perfect for me to dabble in the fundamentals of Bluetooth Mesh and to get to grips with the models. Hopefully there is enough space for me to try my own code. Perhaps it’s possible to compress the Zephyr RTOS runtime down a little??

25th July

Been reading about how to figure out the size of the runtime. You just run the command ninja rom_report

I don’t know what those numbers actually mean. I had assumed bytes, but that would mean the bluetooth library, if measured in bytes, was around 50KB and I know that’s not right.

28th July

I experimented with the Zephyr mesh_demo sample, but couldn’t make it work. Kept getting error codes when trying to send messages. I tried to tweak it here and there, but I was just strumbling around in the dark. I returned, instead, to the Bluetooth developer guide and gave that go. The guide starts at the Switch module.

The sample code wasn’t up-to-date with the latest Zephyr code, so I had to tweak it somewhat, but I got it to compile and, amazingly, it worked.

You can continue following my adventures here