Couple of things happening:
@Zonker has a nice summary page of his Particle process at arduinoprojectz [licensed for non-commercial use only] / Particle Mesh Dashboard
My Fanstel USB Thread Dongles arrived, still need to wait for the Nordic and Seeedstudio ones
On ubuntu I can see these dongles using
ls /dev/ttyA*
but can't seem to move the NCP image to the dongle.
If I load the dongle on my windows machine it auto enters DFU mode, but I am not sure which software to use with it. Bit worried that the Dongle has no buttons to push so not sure how to get it back to DFU mode if I install anything on it.
Nordic has some fancy software and Apps that might work with it. The nrftoolbox for android
and and outdatedSDK for windows
Looks like Nordic is moving away from OpenThread.
Lots to learn as I dig a bit deeper.
Found this interesting bit of information about how to eventually use some of the OpenThread C++ commands with Particle Mesh devices but have a fair bit to learn about how to do it. Once again a bit confused about how to move programs from the computer to the devices.
Wondering if anyone has messed around with cloud virtual linux boxes such as: https://repl.it or https://glitch.com for working on either the Particle/firmware github or the Openthread github . I teach using http://c9.io but it needs a creditcard to get started. (It costs $1 per month to assign all my students to have logins to a ubuntu virtual machine. Not sure if it has fully been absorbed by AWS, but the community does not seem very active lately.)
These virtual machines might work with an Over The Air type Mesh device installation but will not work with anything that needs physical connections, however often fun just to see how an installation works using the virtual box before trying it on your own ubuntu computer.
Most of the information about the OpenThread Border Router will be at this thread, but I will probably post summaries here.