Argons in peer to peer config?

I must have missed this or though it needed more thought over the weekend. Some of your answers are in your other post. The bottom line is that you cannot do ad-hoc mesh networks as you desire. The mesh networking does not happen over WiFi. The mesh network is 802.15.4 on a separate radio from the WiFi. Don’t confuse this mesh networking with the newer WiFi routers that provide “mesh networking” with repeater nodes and such. This mesh implementation is similar, not identical.

For the other points:

  1. Every Photon, P1, P0, Argon can connect to WiFi. Even though you might not desire a connection to the cloud, it’s there for you if you need it. Especially useful is the OTA code flashing.

  2. Yes, every WiFi device can continue to run your user program without an active WiFi connection. You need to use some special system modes such as SYSTEM_MODE(MANUAL) or SYSTEM_MODE(SEMI-AUTOMATIC) and SYSTEM_THREAD(ENABLED) is also needed to keep your user code independent of the network status.

  3. Not sure if ad-hoc proximity mesh networks will ever be available. It’s an interesting use case. I see applications in robotics and especially for robot “swarms”. Perhaps the mesh products could have an “unsecured mesh” mode whereby any device could join the mesh network without security.

You might be able to do something with Bluetooth and/or WiFi. Communication among a bot swarm could be facilitated by either the particle cloud pub/sub or within a local network using UDP multicast. The difficult part is measuring proximity. Both cloud and UDP communication require an active WiFi connection which can cover large areas, even entire campuses. For local proximity, you could build a system that looks for bluetooth beacons and then joins the WiFi multicast when a BT beacon is detected. I’m not sure how the bluetooth beacons work but perhaps each bot could broadcast a multicast address on the beacon that new/non-joined bots could join. Once a multicast is joined, the robot starts advertising that current multicast address on their beacon. Bluetooth would give you the shorter proximity range I think you’re looking for. WiFi could provide the communications backbone.

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