The first Thread Group-certified industrial gateway was developed by Chinese startup and new Nordic Partner Program design partner, HooRii Technology. The ‘Hoo Max Industrial Gateway’ provides native support for OpenThread applications in commercial and industrial scenarios – such as a Thread-based mesh sensor network, an open source wireless mesh RF software protocol with native IPv6 support .
Wireless Protocol Deployment
The highly scalable solution is designed to support high-density, low-latency applications and provide wireless protocol deployment possibilities for IoT scenarios with both massive and stringent requirements. The gateway provides a solid foundation for deploying OpenThread network redundancy, ensuring high availability for mesh networks in demanding environments, according to the company.
The Hoo Max industrial gateway uses Nordic’s nRF52833 SoC to support Thread connectivity. For example, in buildings with a wide range of Thread-connected lights, sensors, and various controllers, the nRF52833 provides mesh connectivity between these devices and the gateway. From the gateway, data can then be relayed to the cloud using Wi-Fi, Ethernet and/or cellular connectivity.
The solution offers local network management and provides dynamic mesh networking self-healing capabilities – for example, if the gateway fails, the endpoint can still communicate through other gateways elsewhere on the network.
Thread Connectivity
“Nordic SoC-compatible Thread connectivity has key advantages including reliability, market maturity, multi-protocol support, low power consumption and, of course, Thread certification,” said Licheng Zhu, CEO of HooRii. Technology.
“We took advantage of Nordic’s rich development and debugging tools, such as the nRF Thread Topology Monitor and Power Profiling Kit II [PPK2]-while the nRF Connect SDK [Software Development Kit] provided out-of-the-box Thread examples.”
Nordic’s nRF52833 advanced multi-protocol SoC features a 64 MHz, 32-bit Arm® Cortex® M4 processor with floating-point unit (FPU) and a 2.4 GHz multi-protocol radio (supporting Bluetooth® 5.3, Bluetooth Direction Finding, Long Range, Bluetooth Mesh, ANT™, Thread, Zigbee, IEEE 802.15.4, NFC and 2.4 GHz proprietary RF protocol software). The dynamic multi-protocol feature uniquely supports simultaneous wireless connectivity of protocols. The nRF Connect SDK is recommended for developing nRF52833 software and supports applications using Bluetooth LE, Bluetooth mesh, and Thread.