I have been experimenting with OpenThread using a RaspberryPi with Nordic 52840 Dongle and a pair of Xiao BLE modules.
The topology looks like this:
What does this let me do? As it stands I can ping either of the Xiao BLE devices from any computer on my network using IPv6. The RaspberryPi+NRF52840 dongle behave as a border router and bridges between the OpenThread/6LowPan network and the wired Ethernet.
This has not been entirely straightforward so far. The XIAO-BLE devices are running Zephyr’s sample echo_server built with this command line:
west build -b xiao_ble echo_server -- -DCONF_FILE="prj.conf overlay-ot.conf"
Prior to this, the project configuration file (prj.conf) was modified as follows:
# Generic networking options
CONFIG_NETWORKING=y
CONFIG_NET_UDP=y
CONFIG_NET_TCP=y
CONFIG_NET_IPV6=y
CONFIG_NET_IPV4=y
CONFIG_NET_SOCKETS=y
CONFIG_NET_SOCKETS_POSIX_NAMES=y
CONFIG_POSIX_MAX_FDS=6
CONFIG_NET_CONNECTION_MANAGER=y
# Kernel options
CONFIG_MAIN_STACK_SIZE=2048
CONFIG_ENTROPY_GENERATOR=y
CONFIG_TEST_RANDOM_GENERATOR=y
CONFIG_INIT_STACKS=y
# Logging
CONFIG_NET_LOG=y
CONFIG_LOG=y
CONFIG_NET_STATISTICS=y
CONFIG_PRINTK=y
# Network buffers
CONFIG_NET_PKT_RX_COUNT=16
CONFIG_NET_PKT_TX_COUNT=16
CONFIG_NET_BUF_RX_COUNT=64
CONFIG_NET_BUF_TX_COUNT=64
CONFIG_NET_CONTEXT_NET_PKT_POOL=y
# IP address options
CONFIG_NET_IF_UNICAST_IPV6_ADDR_COUNT=3
CONFIG_NET_IF_MCAST_IPV6_ADDR_COUNT=4
CONFIG_NET_MAX_CONTEXTS=10
# Network shell
CONFIG_NET_SHELL=y
CONFIG_SHELL=y
# Network application options and configuration
CONFIG_NET_CONFIG_SETTINGS=y
CONFIG_NET_CONFIG_NEED_IPV6=y
#CONFIG_NET_CONFIG_MY_IPV6_ADDR="2001:db8::3"
#CONFIG_NET_CONFIG_PEER_IPV6_ADDR="2001:db8::1"
#CONFIG_NET_CONFIG_NEED_IPV4=y
#CONFIG_NET_CONFIG_MY_IPV4_ADDR="192.0.2.1"
#CONFIG_NET_CONFIG_PEER_IPV4_ADDR="192.0.2.2"
# Number of socket descriptors might need adjusting
# if there are more than 1 handlers defined.
CONFIG_POSIX_MAX_FDS=12
# How many client can connect to echo-server simultaneously
CONFIG_NET_SAMPLE_NUM_HANDLERS=1
CONFIG_OPENTHREAD_DHCP6_SERVER=y
CONFIG_OPENTHREAD_SLAAC=y
CONFIG_NET_IF_UNICAST_IPV6_ADDR_COUNT=6
# need to add this so that the module can join the thread network
CONFIG_OPENTHREAD_JOINER=y
This creates a file called Zephyr.uf2 which is copied to the XIAO devices when they are in UF2 bootloader mode (press the button on them twice).
The NRF52840 dongle code was obtained from https://github.com/openthread/ot-nrf528xx/blob/main/src/nrf52840/README.md
This was compiled as follows:
./script/build nrf52840 USB_trans -DOT_BOOTLOADER=USB
arm-none-eabi-objcopy -O ihex build/bin/ot-rcp ot-rcp.hex
nrfutil pkg generate --hw-version 52 --sd-req=0x00 --application ot-rcp.hex --application-version 1 ot-rcp.zip
nrfutil dfu usb-serial -pkg ot-rcp.zip -p /dev/ttyACM0
(The NRF52840 dongle has to be in DFU mode for the last line to work)
Finally, the raspberry pi 3 had to be set up. This is running Raspbian and the OpenThread border router services were obtained by cloning https://github.com/openthread/ot-br-posix, building and compiling (and much fiddling about!).
Where to from here? Well, the whole point of this experiment is to compare the BLE/GATT/GAP approach to IoT to one using IPv6 and “traditional” network function calls.
ioprog 
One thought on “OpenThread experiments”