PIXIE Bluetooth Mesh

PIXIE uses what’s called Bluetooth mesh. Bluetooth and Bluetooth mesh technology has been around some time. The best way to describe Bluetooth mesh is, imagine I’ve got a home full of PIXIE smart home equipment. I’m sitting in my bedroom, but I want to control the lights in my lounge room, for example. So if I have my PIXIE products installed throughout the home, and heres a mock-up on the table here in front of us, and I’m sitting in the bedroom, but I want to control the switch in the lounge room. I open my phone and I simply connect, physically, to this device. So my phone will actually connect to the first Bluetooth device it finds. And when I send a message out, this device will retransmit it to the next one, which will retransmit it to the next one. So on and so forth until it gets to the lounge room.

Now obviously, on the table here, we’re going through this step-by-step and very slowly, but in reality, this happens in microseconds. So the human eye finds it very difficult to understand the difference between when I press it and when the light turns on. You don’t really notice the difference. So that’s Bluetooth mesh technology.

When we’re talking about any radio signal, it’s important to understand that, of course it’s radio and therefore there’s some limitations in what it can do. So with PIXIE, we say that when it’s installed inside a brick veneer home, inside gyprock, you’ll get about 15 meters between those devices. So as long as each of those devices are within 15 meters of each other, they’ll typically communicate and talk to each other. So it stands to reason, you can probably see the more PIXIE devices you have in the home, the better Bluetooth mesh environment you’re creating for your home to communicate reliably.

However, it is important that we talk about double brick and concrete [inaudible 00:01:47] and what in that environment is. We recommend that you get one concrete wall between connections. So for example, if I have three bedrooms that are right next to each other, and I have PIXIE devices in each of those. Likely that all of those devices are going to communicate to each other and be successfully retransmitting their signals. However, if I were to take those devices out in the middle there, and I’ve got one brick wall here and another brick wall here, it’s entirely likely that those devices over time may struggle to communicate reliably. Of course, we’ll talk about some of the solutions and ways you can get around that, but it’s important to understand that general rule of thumb when you’re designing your own homes with the PIXIE Bluetooth mesh products.