Boron + 5-Xenon Setup Questions

@RWB, Thread/Mesh runs at 250Kbps. UDP is used to minimize traffic.

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My first application was intended to be simply a point to point BLE connection, Sensor to Xenon, BLE connected to the Boron (Electron replacement). Since our products already use the Electrons successfully, I was hoping that this would be a gateway to adding additional sensors rather quickly. One at first, then others as we became comfortable with the technology.
Since the BLE is used for setup of new devices, is there any information on communicating with it now using BLE and iphones, or other BLE transmitters and receivers? Our product already employs a BLE transmitter/receiver to communicate with a phone app. Maybe we could communicate that way until the mesh icommunication is developed.

@TomEldredge, Particle has committed to developing a BLE API for users and it is high in the punch list. However, device setup and configuration is their primary focus right now. Stay tuned!

Could any of you experienced support engineers take a shot at an estimate on when you think Particle will implement BLE communications? I am trying to consider all options for business purposes.

@TomEldredge, here is the official response from Particle:

Stability and reliability is top priority for the Particle team. Once we are confident in the stability and reliability of Mesh and Cloud connectivity, they will start tackling new features. BLE is on top of that list but there is no ETA at this time.

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As @will states in this post, in order to transition customers from the ReadBear Duo, they need to have bluetooth on mesh up and running for end-users. The targets stated were end of Q1 2019.

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@ninjatill, the response I posted was directly from @jberi this morning in regards to the timeline.

I just received one of my Particle orders and it has an Argon in it, so I will proceed with trying to do things with these products with the Argon instead of the Boron, because my home office does not have cell reception.
Are there any issues I need to be aware of concerning this change?

My three xenons seem to spend a lot of time flashing green rather than breathing cyan. They will stay breathing cyan a while then drop back to flashing green. I am wondering why they drop out from cloud connection. Also, one xenon often blinks red.

Understood. I know those targets are an estimate if anything… and if it goes anything like the pre-order timeline, it will shift “to the right” a bit.

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I have not had good success with the Xenon stability with more than one Xenon endpoint on the mesh. I have 2 mesh networks; the one at home is 1 Argon with 1 Xenon, the one at work is 1 Argon with 4 Xenon. I have had both networks running the “Marco Polo” code since I unboxed them. The one at work is running with SYSTEM_THREAD(ENABLED).

The mesh at home is very stable. Never misses a beat. Most of the time latency for a round trip MarcoPolo is in the teens and well below 30ms. Occasionally, latency spikes in the 100ms range. Not sure why but I suspect RF noise. Here is the stability chart for the last 6 hours. Look like latency is fairly low and only 1 response missed that whole time:

The mesh at work is another animal. Even with all the Xenon endpoints in the same room, I cannot get it to reliably respond to every MarcoPolo. The latency almost always is in the 100-200ms range and it’s usually receiving 3 out of the 4 mesh node responses. For the last 24 hours, there has not been a 5 minute period where all 4 responses were received on every Marco. And as I’m typing this, I see that my mesh connection dropped at about 10:33 this morning and I just had to reset the Argon to get it reporting again.

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If you have ruled out the Xenon router allergy then maybe you have an unlucky/bad hardware or interference.

I get 99.9% with 1 argon gateway, 3 xenon.

@TomEldredge did you try hooking your gateway (argon or whatever) to an old router - there are ip6 and dns issues with new routers AND multiple dns entries in router.

I believe Particle knows but we haven’t a fix yet.

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They have a fix for many of the IPv6/DHCP/DNS issues but it's not published yet.
But I know that rc.26 has resolved my immediate issues with Argon & Xenon and so should be others.

@gusgonnet Where ya at? Your new stuff arrive?

My new workaround is eliminating 3 DNS entries in my router (going down to two (or less)).
and disabling ip6

after that all is good with my linksys wrt1900ac router.

again, nothing wrong with the router - there is just a particle problem with mesh xenon’s connecting through a gateway with EITHER OF ip6 OR 3+ DNS entries.

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I'm a happy bunny! Got my stuff last week, ramping up in progress. Thanks for asking!

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I was just wondering how it was going for ya up there :snowboarder:

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Hi ninjatill,

Just updated an Argon and Xenon to FW v0.8.0-rc.27. The Argon runs your “Marco” and the Xenon runs your “Polo” code. The Xenon started blinking red (SOS) after updating from v0.8.0-rc.26 to v0.8.0-rc.27.

One has to wait till the mesh network is ready before subscribing to a topic now. I recommend you add the following to the setup() methods.

void setup() {
    Serial.begin(9600);

    while(!Mesh.ready()) {
        // wait till mesh is ready
    }
    Mesh.subscribe("Marco", ProcessBeat);
}
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You’d better use waitUntil(Mesh.ready) or place a Particle.process() call inside your while() loop.

BTW, when you see SOS you should also count the blinks that follow it to tell what panic error it is. I guess it’s SOS+10 (Assertion Fault), right?

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Thanks for the tip. Yes, it was an SOS+10.

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I added the waitUntil in v0.3.2. I’ll add to the older versions when I get a chance.

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