This page contains information about the compatibility status of the nRF5 SDK for Mesh with Nordic's development kits and SoftDevice versions.

If a Nordic kit is not mentioned on this page, it means that it is not supported.

For more information about Nordic kits, see Nordic Development Kits.

Table of contents

Full compatibility

The Bluetooth mesh stack is fully compatible with the configurations mentioned in the following table.

Device	Boards	SoftDevices
nRF52840_xxAA	PCA10056	S140 v6.0.0/v6.1.0/v6.1.1/v7.0.1/v7.2.0 S113 v7.0.1/v7.2.0
nRF52833_xxAA	PCA10100	S140 v7.0.1/v7.2.0 S113 v7.0.1/v7.2.0
nRF52832_xxAA	PCA10040	S132 v5.0.0/v6.0.0/v6.1.0/v6.1.1/v7.0.1/v7.2.0 S113 v7.0.1/v7.2.0 S112 v7.2.0

All examples are compatible with these configurations.

Limited or deprecated compatibility

The Bluetooth mesh stack is not fully compatible with the configurations mentioned in the following table.

Device	Boards	SoftDevices
nRF52840_xxAA (limited compatibility)	PCA10059	S140 v6.0.0/v6.1.0/v6.1.1/v7.0.1/v7.2.0 S113 v7.0.1/v7.2.0
nRF52820_xxAA (limited compatibility)	PCA10100e	S112 v7.2.0 S113 v7.2.0
nRF52810_xxAA (limited compatibility)	PCA10040e	S112 v6.0.0/v6.1.0/v6.1.1/v7.0.1/v7.2.0
nRF51422_xxAC (deprecated compatibility)	PCA10028	S130 v2.0.1

See the following sections for detailed information.

Limited compatibility with nRF52840 on PCA10059 dongle

The Bluetooth mesh stack is fully compatible with the nRF52840 platform, but only few examples have support for running on the nRF52840 dongle, and this support is limited. Only the server light switch example has been tested with the dongle.

The nRF52840 dongle is shipped with a USB bootloader that can be used to flash the desired application and SoftDevice using the Programmer application available in nRF Connect for Desktop.

The following limitations apply to all supported examples:

Only a single button is available on the dongle. Therefore, example functionalities are limited, because only the first button assignment will work. See example documentation pages for details.
RTT interface is not available. Therefore, neither RTT input nor RTT logging is supported for any of the examples. For this reason, the examples that completely depend on RTT input for user interaction cannot be used on the dongle.
The dongle has one green LED and three color LEDs. All four LEDs can be used in examples. However, the three color LEDs are combined into a single physical RGB LED. For this reason, various blinking patterns used for user signalling (such as device identification) in the example applications will look different on the dongle.
As of v1.4.3, the dongle Programmer application does not support erasing of the empty flash areas. Therefore, once the device is provisioned, it cannot be unprovisioned by flashing the same example again. To unprovision the device, use one of the following methods:
- Trigger a node reset using the nRF Mesh mobile application or any other configuration client.
- Modify the example application to trigger the node reset after pressing SW1 (Button 1) on the dongle.
- Flash another example with different device composition and the Bluetooth mesh stack will automatically unprovision the device on the next reboot.

The following examples cannot be run on the nRF52840 dongle, and therefore they are not supported:

DFU example (because of the presence of the USB bootloader and due to the lack of built-in serial port emulator)
Serial example (because of the lack of built-in Serial port emulator)
Coexistence examples

Other examples can be potentially run on the nRF52840 dongle (only the server example), but with limited functionality.

Limited compatibility with nRF52810 and nRF52820

The Bluetooth mesh stack is compatible with the nRF52810 and nRF52820 platforms, but these specific platforms are not supported by the current version of the nRF5 SDK for Mesh.

These platforms are very limited in both flash and RAM, therefore they do not currently support DFU, and logging is disabled to save flash. Furthermore, the nRF52810 and nRF52820 must be compiled with optimization for size, that is with one of the following options based on your building approach choice:

for CMake: -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=MinSizeRel
for Segger Embedded Studio: ReleaseWithDebugInformation setting enabled

For these reasons, the following examples do not support nRF52810 and nRF52820, and can be run only on the fully compatible Development Kits:

Deprecated compatibility with nRF51

nRF51 is no longer officially supported. The examples are built for the nRF5 SDK v17.0.2 and the SoftDevices S113, S132 and S140, and are not compatible with the nRF51 devices.