news

Espressif’s BLE Mesh SDK Is Now Bluetooth-SIG-certified

Shanghai, China
Feb 5, 2019

Espressif is pleased to announce that the ESP BLE-Mesh SDK has been Bluetooth-SIG-certified, as of January 2019.

After the release of the BLE Mesh protocol by Bluetooth SIG, Espressif’s Bluetooth-Low-Energy team swiftly began planning the development of the ESP BLE Mesh SDK. After over a year of research, not only can Espressif’s implementation of the Bluetooth Mesh support BLE-Mesh-related applications, but it has also been granted the official Bluetooth SIG certification, previously known as BQB.

In November 2018 Espressif created a temporary BLE Mesh branch in its official IoT Development Framework for ESP32. The purpose of doing this was to give the opportunity to developers from around the world to take a look at it and provide feedback, while the later version was still being prepared. Sharing our code and our latest developments with the community is a standardized practice at Espressif. Our constant interaction with the community gives us the opportunity to realize and fix any issues developers might have when using our development framework, before each new version of it is officially released. We believe that this level of transparency ultimately works for the benefit of everyone.

Espressif’s BLE Mesh SDK is built on top of the Zephyr BLE Mesh SDK. Zephyr is a collaborative project hosted by The Linux Foundation, with more than 400 worldwide developers using it for their own projects, which provides a very solid basis for Espressif to further develop the SDK.

ESP BLE Mesh

The temporary BLE Mesh branch is still in use and supports the BLE-Mesh-enabled provisioner or node, along with segmentation of the mesh network, as well relay and proxy, and a range of generic client models such as lighting and sensors.

New features will be added to ESP BLE Mesh, such as Low Power Node, Friend Node and NVS (Non-volatile storage). Also, fast network provisioning, Wi-Fi & BLE Mesh coexistence performance and rapid OTA update will be further optimized. In particular, the Fast Provisioning Model has speeded up the network provisioning process, with 100 nodes being network-provisioned within 50 seconds during our demo test.

Here, you can also view the demo video of Espressif’s BLE Mesh.

The latest version of ESP BLE Mesh SDK is expected to be released along with ESP-IDF v4.0. In the meantime, if you are interested in getting started with BLE Mesh networking on ESP32, you should go to the beta branch of ESP-IDF, which supports mesh networking, and take a look at the code and examples.

Like BLE Mesh, Espressif’s Wi-Fi Mesh has always been considered user-friendly by developers using it in their Mesh application development. The table below provides a comparison between the features of Espressif’s Wi-Fi Mesh and BLE Mesh.

comparison table

Share this article
  • LinkedIn
  • 微信

    微信分享

    打开微信“扫一扫”,打开网页后点击屏幕右上角分享按钮
Reuse this content