The nRF5 SDK for Mesh is Nordic Semiconductor's implementation of the Bluetooth Mesh. It allows applications to utilize the features provided by the Bluetooth Mesh when running on Nordic's nRF5 Series chips.

Make sure to check the Release Notes for the current release, and the Migration guide for migration between releases.

Refer to License for the Copyright Notice.

Important:

The nRF5 SDK for Mesh now requires the nRF5 SDK 15.0.0 to compile. Please refer to Building the mesh stack and examples for more information.

In an application using nRF5 SDK for Mesh, interrupt priorities need to be considered carefully, see Interrupt priority levels.

Compatibility

The mesh stack is compatible with the following configurations:

SoC	Board(s)	SoftDevice(s)
nRF51422_xxAC (deprecated)	PCA10028	S130 v2.0.1
nRF52810_xxAA¹	PCA10040e	S112 v6.0.0
nRF52832_xxAA	PCA10040	S132 v5.0.0/v6.0.0
nRF52840_xxAA	PCA10056	S140 v6.0.0

The mesh stack is also compatible with the nRF52810 platform, but not supported by this version of the nRF5 SDK for Mesh. Support for the nRF51 Series platform is being dropped, but building the examples² is still supported using the CMake build system.

Resource usage

For information about resource usage, see the Resource usage document.

Documentation

Refer to the following guides for understanding basic concepts of Bluetooth mesh and architecture of the Nordic nRF5 SDK for Mesh:

SDK

The nRF5 SDK for Mesh documentation is organized as follows:

Introduction to nRF5 SDK for Mesh : Information providing an overview of nRF5 SDK for Mesh
Getting started : Tutorials describing how to perform common tasks such as installing toolchain, building the stack and examples, how to perform DFU, etc.
Libraries : Libraries implementing common tasks in an application using nRF5 SDK for Mesh
Scripts : The Interactive Python Application Controller Interface documentation
Examples : nRF5 SDK for Mesh example applications
API Reference : The API documentation
Data structures : Documentation for the data structures and data fields used by the APIs

Repository Structure

The nRF5 SDK for Mesh repository is organized as follows:

bin contains prebuilt binaries of all examples optimized for space (directory: \ospace) and for time (directory: \otime).
CMake contains CMake setup files and utility functions.
doc contains the main documentation and configuration files for Doxygen generation.
examples contains example applications using the mesh stack and supporting modules.
external contains external dependencies used by the mesh stack and examples (mainly uECC, Segger RTT and the SoftDevice).
mesh contains the source code and unit tests for the mesh stack.
models contains the source code for various models.
scripts contains useful scripts, such as a parser and communication script for the serial interface provided by the mesh stack.
tools contains tools useful for development.

Reporting issues

We appreciate all bug reports and fixes. We kindly ask you to report all issues through DevZone and someone from technical support will ensure it is tracked internally. Unfortunately we currently do not have a good system in place for integrating fixes through the public GitHub mirror. That is why we cannot accept any pull request at the moment.

¹ nRF52810 support is limited. It is very limited in both Flash and RAM, therefore it does not currently support DFU and logging is disabled to save flash. Furthermore, it should be compiled with optimization for size, i.e., -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=MinSizeRel for CMake or the 'ReleaseWithDebugInformation' setting in SEGGER Embededd Studio.

² The Light switch proxy example is for the nRF52 Series only.