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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

When i looked at previous Espressif chips, their mesh networking implementation for Bluetooth was proprietary. The Bluetooth standard contains a mesh networking standard. Is there any affordable SoC that lets me build a standard Bluetooth mesh application without having to start from scratch?

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Mesh networks are relatively new to the Standard. True LE 5 SoCs should have what you need to get started.

When I played around with ESP32 when it just came out, the problem was that the toolchains and software just weren't done yet. There were a lot of features that existed on hardware, but without toolchain support, docs, or sample code it was close to impossible to use them.

I'm not sure how it works now, but especially for newer stuff I wouldn't rely on the fact that the hardware claims to support something -- if the software isn't there, it just doesn't really mean much.

I'm not familiar with other microcontrollers, but ESP-IDF seems to be very actively developed. I bought a wESP32 a few months ago and initially couldn't figure out how to enable ethernet... came back after some ESP-IDF updates and had it working in 10 minutes.

But you are probably correct about the latest chips.

ESP-IDF is super friendly, I was amazed how easy it was to get it set up and configured compared to my experience with some other embedded toolchains I've used before.

The Bluetooth Mesh standard actually is based on a Bluetooth 4.0 feature set (basic advertising and scanning), so really any BLE device can support it. The problem is that the software is complicated, so typically only newer devices have software support.

Many chip vendors have BT mesh implementations, including Nordic, TI, SiLabs, Cypress, Dialog, and ST.

As I recall it's not a particular good mesh networking standard either. I think all the nodes just blindly rebroadcast all packets.

I can't remember the exact details but I remember being disappointed when it was announced and I looked into it.

It’s a little bit better than that, in that only some nodes rebroadcast everything while you can have lower-power nodes be primarily in transmit mode. But yes, I think the spec could use a lot of improvement.

It does seem like there’s a lot of momentum in the BT-SIG to grow the standard over a long period of time, and there also are a lot of active contributors, so I do expect it to mature in the future.

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