Ambient Sensors Demo on Golioth's Website
Here at Ambient Sensors, we wanted to create a demo of Bluetooth™ Mesh lighting, but really wanted it to fit on a tabletop. That was a problem – how to fit a bunch of luminaires (commercial lights) into such a small space? We had used the bbc:microbits to inspire some of the young future engineers in our families (they are a lot of fun to play with and use for learning). We had also used them as simple examples of BLE devices, since they are supported by the NRF Connect SDK/Zephyr and have an nRF52833 BLE SoC.
So the idea hit us – why couldn’t we use these same bbc:microbits as stand-ins for luminaires? They have LEDs and BLE chips! So the bbc:microbit became our bbc:microluminaire. We connected a bunch of microbits to a bunch of batteries, and controlled from the Golioth cloud console via a Nordic Thingy91 (nRF52840 and nRF9160).
Chris Gammell from Golioth liked the demo and created a very cool PC board to compactly power and hold the “luminaires” (no more batteries strung around the table). He took the demo to EW24 in Nuremberg, and his team also showed it at the embedded conference in Seattle soon after.
Golioth is releasing a series of blog posts about the demo.
- The first post explains the demo, along with a video that Chris recorded. – link to the first post on the Golioth website
- The second post describes how the nRF9160 connects to Golioth to move data from the Bluetooth mesh to the cloud – link to the second post on the Golioth website.
- Watch this space….
The “luminaires” in the demo are just placeholders for real lights – these Nordic chips (nRF52833) and others in the nRF52/nRF53/nRF54 family can be used to create lighting controllers, switches, sensors, or a myriad of other Bluetooth Mesh devices. We specialize in Bluetooth Mesh development – standard SIG or custom Bluetooth Mesh models – whatever makes the most sense for your product line.
We would be glad to sit down with your team to discuss hardware, firmware, mobile app, and cloud design and development services. We also have an RF chamber, and can provide FCC pre-certification testing.