First, Spectra was a blast and kudos to the Particle Team. Particle’s continued commitment to this tech space is apparent and we’re all in with our first P1 based product launch this month!
Hands on with the new Gen3 mesh hardware was also quite awesome, however, my immediate needs for our next product require a device that can provide standard BLE services so that I can advertise and link to personal smart devices like phones, tablets, and the like. Coexistence of BLE and mesh would be most perfect for my use case, and having an Argon or Gateway Xenon is the cherry on top.
My only disappointment from Spectra was learning that firmware support for standard BLE 4.x/5.x services is coming down the road and won’t be surfaced for the initial release of the new mesh hardware. Trust me, I understand the heavy lift aspect of the Gen3 product release and realize the prime directive for that launch is meshing.
With that said, does anyone else here in the community have similar needs? There’s likely someone with the chops and gumption to integrate this in the form of a library that can leverage the new nRF52 silicon and make this type of operation accessible. I’m putting this out here in hopes of accelerating this capability.