I am just wondering what the pro cons of using Open Thread and BLE are? How are they comparable? and when to use one over the other?
I’m testing the BLE features now and I’m wondering how much power savings there is when using BLE vs MESH. I’m assuming BLE is lower power but not sure.
What I like about the BLE broadcasting is that I can receive the data on just about any device that has BLE built in like my cell phone, ipad, laptop, and tons of other devices which you can’t do when using the Open Thread MESH.
I just started playing with the BLE but so far it’s been stable where over time I would have issues with the MESH network just not staying up all the time but that’s quite a few firmware releases ago when I was doing the MESH testing so I can’t comment on how stable MESH is today.
@jrjack, Open Thread is used to create a mesh network using Particle Gen3 devices. BLE on Gen3 devices cannot be used for mesh but can be used to gather data from beacons to the publish to the mesh and the Particle Cloud. In the case of Particle Gen3 devices, mesh and BLE are complimentary, not mutually exclusive.
My understanding is that you can connect to multiple devices with the bluetooth on gen 3 products. Given this, couldn’t you make a BLE mesh of sorts where you take information from one and pass it to another in a chain as far as needed?
Currently you can only connect to 1 device via BLE and this should be increased to 3.
Also “native” mesh is more than that as the system itself cares about the routing of packets with the proposed “pseudo mesh” you’d have to care for all of that and the devices would have to be host and client to eachother simultaneously.
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So how does a Gen3 Device tell the difference between different broadcasting BLE devices? Does each have a serial number that you have to use in a callback or something?
That is up to the creator.
When you setup the broadcaster you also setup advertising data
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