Friends,
I’m hopign to set up a an ad-hoc peer to peer network with up to 6 Argons when they come tomorrow. The behavior I need is that when any (or all) of the Argons are within Meshing distance the join a network and one of the devices is elected as the master. That master device will drive some synchronized behavior (bling led strips) between itself and all the other devices . I’d liek tot he network to be robust and react properly to new devices coming into the mesh and existing ones…leaving including the master. I was hoping to find a simple example of that sort of meshing behavior… but haven’t seen one. Has anyone tried something like that ? It seems to me to be one of the most useful aspects of meshing to do that sort of ad-hoc and resilient network creation. Any quick hep appreciated. as this is part of an Xmas present idea. Thanks !
-jc
At this time, you can not add more than one gateway (Argon or Boron) to a mesh network. Adding multiple gateways is considered a “high availability” network which hasn’t been implemented add of the current device OS (rc26). HA is on the roadmap but you won’t get a definitive timeline for implementation.
Furthermore, you can not have mesh devices join a mesh network dynamically (which I think you were describing). Currently, you must add mesh devices manually. After the manual addition a device can drop off a network and reconnect (when turned back on our brought back within range.) Once a mesh device is added to a network it can not join any other network without going through that manual mesh joining process. I don’t know if dynamic joining to networks is on the device OS roadmap.
If I read your intent correctly, you may have joined this party a bit too early. If you meant to only use WiFi for your ad-hoc network, then disregard the above as my comments are predicated on using the built-in mesh networking capabilities.
To add on that:
HA mesh networks (more than one gateway) will also be falling into a payed tier (unlike micro networks with one gateway of which you can have up to 10 free).
When talking about gateways per mesh then that’s “devices that could potentially be gateways” and is irrespective of whether or not it currently acts as such. So electing only one device to be the only gateway won’t make the network a micro network.
Also I’m pretty sure the Argon doesn’t support peer-to-peer WiFi yet - and I’m not convinced that feature will come anytime soon (if at all).
Thanks for the response and oh boy am I disappointed. This sounds like it was all released quite prematurely… Is the only intent of the mash to extend a fix network? It doesn’t sound very interesting to me
I need to return all of this gear I bought… And come up with another solution
Does anyone have a suggestion for up your peer to peer system? I do not need cloud interaction at all here
Thanks again for getting back to me and if anyone from Particle is listening I suggest you do some significant work outlined those restrictions. I’ve been reading for the last few days and this is the first time I’ve seen definitively what you cannot do with these Mash devices…
I suspect that others will agree with me that the Hype around the release of these devices gives no indication that they are restricted as you have described
Thanks for getting back to me!
-jv
@johncohn, sorry for your miss-fire on the Argons. I think you might have misconstrued a few points in the product descriptions about the mesh capabilities. In your defense… I looked at the Argon product page and it doesn’t really describe what their version of mesh is. It basically lists out the Nordic SoC capabilities. The “WiFi Bundle” at least says “refer to the docs for more info”. But you would have to dig a lot farther to figure out what you can’t do with mesh. Perhaps this Mesh 101 and Mesh 102 blog posts should be more prominent in the store. I had to google-search to find them only because I knew they existed from the some mentions here in the community.
I don’t really agree with the mesh sales strategy at the moment. There have been some other threads about the pre-order but none that raise this point. I bought mesh as part of the pre-order. I knew that the pre-order meant I was entering into an implicit agreement with Particle which included:
- Be patient. The hardware was still in design phase and there could be delays in any steps of the progress.
- Don’t pre-order hardware expecting to insert them into production products where high-reliability is needed. Getting in on the pre-order was more about testing the bleeding-edge rather getting them into mass-production products immediately. Refer to point 1.
- Some features might not be available right away. I think even a lot of the pre-order customers were surprised at how much of an alpha release RC25 was… but, refer back to point 1.
If you buy mesh hardware on the Particle store today, I do not believe such an agreement exists whether implicit or explicit. There’s no mention in the product descriptions that the hardware was just released and the firmware is in alpha. Based on this description you could argue the firmware is in beta (since it’s a public release), but I think too many features are still missing that were mentioned in the marketing material (Bluetooth API being the largest missing feature along side with sleep modes and multiple gateways.)
The Particle team is doing a great job to catch up on the firmware so you might not want to return all of your hardware. But you will need a Xenon or two to make any use of the mesh network with your Argons right now. I think there are some really ingenious use-cases for mesh and will be somewhat of a game changer in the IoT marketplace.
Sorry but I don’t know of any IoT hardware that advertises ad-hoc WiFi networks. I like the Particle ecosystem so I’m not well versed in all the other gear out there.
To work around that need I have proposed a possible solution that on the one hand allows for multi-Argon/Boron networks and still doesn't interfere with Particle's policy to differentiate between micro and high avalability networks.
In order to do that some kind of "lock mechanism" could be introduced that prevens a router/endnode Argon/Boron to be promoted to become a gateway unless it gets a firmware update.
That way you could have a pure Argon mesh which only ever has one gateway at the risk of losing that without a safe failover - for that you'd have to pay the HA tier or recreate the mesh with a newly "physically" nominated gateway.
But that proposal hasn't found much support yet 
Interesting strategy. I would also propose a simple 24-hour delay in billing if a second (or multiple) gateway is added. If the second gateway is removed (getting the mesh back down to 1 gateway) within the 24-hours, the HA billing does not kick in. That would allow someone to swap out their gateway on the mesh. I supposed some sort of time-lock period on that billing delay would be necessary to prevent abuse. (i.e. you can’t do the swap a second time within the 24-hours or something.)
All, i appreciate the continued discussion on this. My main point here is that the current limitations around network topology and and static vs dynamic pairing just need to be made more clear on the doc page. I’m sure these will be solved in time… . Thanks !
-jc
Dropping my two cents that I am also finding the mesh experience to be poorly thought out so far. I also have several use cases that can’t be done without letting argons/borons join the same network, and definitely need an ability to dynamically set credentials programatically in order to allow devices to switch networks. It’s a nice development board as long as you aren’t trying to build something using the most advertised differentiated feature.
Hey folks.
Thank you for the feedback – it sounds like some of the features that are most important to you (like high availability networks) aren’t available right now, which I understand would be disappointing.
Our intention is never to mislead anyone around the capabilities of our Gen 3 hardware – if you feel like you were mislead as a part of the purchasing process and would like to return your hardware, please send us a note at http://particle.io/support.
If there are instances where you feel like we are advertising features that aren’t currently available for our Gen 3 hardware (either on our website or retail store), please feel welcome to share feedback with me in a PM, and I’ll work with our marketing team to implement appropriate language.
Will do 
!
I reamin a big fan of particle !
-jc
I am extremely disappointed to find out multi-gateway will be a paid network feature. Given how unreliable it seems the gateway can be right now I was hoping to add a second. (I was searching for how when I ran into this post)
It has gotten better, just put RC27 on my test setup, but was happy to see my RC26 alive for more than 20-180 minutes. (which was miles better than the <60 minutes with RC25)
Anyone want a deal on 6 Xenons (2 unopened), 2 Argons, and a Boron? I want out.