Preconfigure Mesh?

[grahamb321]

My setup is this:

I have a Mesh network setup on a remote site. I want to ship a Xenon to that site and preconfigure it to connect to that mesh. Is there anyway to do this?

[nrobinson2000]

I think there is a way to do that in the CLI, but you’ll need an assisting device.

Command Line Interface (CLI) | Reference

I haven’t tried this command in the CLI yet, but I think the assisting device needs to be powered and near the device you want to add.

I’m not sure if you can do it totally remote.

This post might help:

I cant join a 2nd device

Hey @Steve_WS5W This can get tricky sometimes. What firmware do you have on the Argon? I have found it better to flash Tinker to the Argon first. That way nothing will cause the process to time out. Alternatively you can use the CLI if you’re comfortable. Here’s the workflow: Plug your device into USB Run particle identify Keep the ID from the output (alternatively if you know the name of the device you can skip this step) Then, you can do a particle mesh add <device ID or name> <argon ID o…

[grahamb321]

Yea, this wouldn’t really help. I’m prototyping a remote temperature monitoring system for a restaurant. I’m going to stage an Argon and a few Xenons and send them. However if they ever need to add another device, or replace a faulty device, I need a way to add them to the mesh without them having to do anything.

I’ve already used the CLI to add a device and this works kinda, but the customer would have to plug them both into a computer that I can install and run the CLI on. That’s not really feasible.

Surely they thought of this use case, any commercial application with Mesh will need this ability

[nrobinson2000]

@grahamb321

Surely they thought of this use case, any commercial application with Mesh will need this ability

@BDub is this on the product roadmap?

[Rftop]

@grahamb321

Surely they thought of this use case, any commercial application with Mesh will need this ability

I agree 100%.
It's hard enough to extend (add nodes at a later date) an existing Particle Mesh locally.
I've hit many roadblocks myself and cant seem to manage it short of starting over with a New Network.

At the bare minimum we need to be able to pre-configure additional Xenon(s) and ship to existing Networks.

I have a Commercial Application for Particle Mesh, but the lack of Mesh Topology tools is a real shortfall when going beyond the Hobby Market.

[Rftop]

Just Brainstorming here:
For the purposes of adding a Xenon to an existing Mesh- Would it ever be possible to set the Mesh Credentials in our Code and flash to a Xenon via DFU mode?
IE: Mesh.setCredentials()

I don’t know how the cloud would handle checking the 10 device limit per mesh in this scenario.
But in my mind, enforcing the 10 device limit (at least in Real Time) is much less important than getting more real-life Mesh Networks operating and generating revenue for Particle and it’s customers/developers.

[grahamb321]

Yea, I have an existing customer base with 350+ locations and 1500+ devices that I would like to migrate to Particle, but can’t see a path to doing that based on this limitation.

Also the mesh signal strength is poor when not LOS. That may be more of a dealbreaker for me.

I am using IOT sensors to monitor commercial refirgeration units and Zigbee works fine however Particle Mesh fails in the same conditions.

[grahamb321]

Flew up to the Particle road show in Pittsburgh hoping to get some home on this. Said it was a known issue, not sure when/if will be addressed. Not sure how mesh is supposed to be used at all outside of a lab until it is.

Oh well