Commissioning a Bluetooth Smart node to a 6LoWPAN network is integrated into all example applications in the IoT SDK. This section describes how to enable commissioning in an example application.

Enable commissioning mode and program the application

Choose one of the projects inside the IoT SDK, for example CoAP server.

In order to activate commissioning mode, the following symbol has to be defined for the C preprocessor:

COMMISSIONING_ENABLED

To define the COMMISSIONING_ENABLED symbol in Keil µVision projects, open the Options for Target dialog and select the C/C++ tab. In the Define field, add COMMISSIONING_ENABLED to the end of the define.

To define the COMMISSIONING_ENABLED symbol for the ARM GCC compiler, add the following line in the C flags section of the Makefile:

CFLAGS += -DCOMMISSIONING_ENABLED

Now compile the example and flash it to the nRF52 Developer Kit.

Button and LED assignments

Once commissioning is enabled, some of the LEDs (LED 3 and LED 4 in most cases) are used to indicate that the node is in Identity mode. Depending on the application, Button 3 or Button 4 is used to erase commissioning-related settings from persistent storage.

Note: The commissioning module does not support Raw mode of the persistent storage manager. Therefore, if Raw mode is used by the application, the original Button assignment stays in place.

Prepare the router side

The Linux based daemon has been prepared for the edge router. The current version of the daemon was tested on OpenWRT targets (Chaos Calmer 15.05) and Ubuntu (Linux Kernel 3.18+), and the documentation describes usage on these systems.

The first step is to build and run the bluetooth_6lowpand daemon.

After the daemon is successfully built, start it up and test if the help window is visible.

bluetooth_6lowpand --help

On an OpenWRT platform with Wi-Fi enabled, the Wi-Fi network configuration can be read and reused by the daemon. In this example, however, the SSID and passphrase will be manually added.

Run the following code:

-# Ensure bluetoothd daemon is turned off
killall bluetoothd
-# Run the daemon and provide SSID and passphrase as arguments
bluetooth_6lowpand -a Nordic:123456

Note: The Linux Kernel does not support BLE Legacy Pairing using OOB - Passkey pairing is used. That means, the passphrase has to have six ascii-digital characters.; The router daemon may also be run using init.d script, by executing /etc/init.d/bluetooth_6owpand start.

Prepare the commissioner

Prepare the Trusted Third Party by installing and running the nRF IoT Joiner Android application.

Configure Wi-Fi manually with the credentials given to the router.

SSID: Nordic
Passphrase: 123456

The next step is to find the already advertising nRF device, which should be visible as NodeCFG in the main dashboard of the mobile application. Select the proper device and configure it with the default parameters (10 seconds delay, 20 seconds of timeout). After the configured delay, the node should connect to the network automatically.

Test the application

Test if the pre-flashed application works properly, for example by pinging the commissioned device.

-# For the node with the Bluetooth device address 00:aa:bb:cc:dd:ee

ping6 fe80::2aa:bbff:fecc:ddee -I bt0