ESP Mesh Lite Leaf Node functionality

[prasad.samudrala]

Hello,

Did anyone tried mesh with ESP Mesh-Lite? I have started working with it and each node is implementing a bridge functionality to enable STA at one to connect to parent and uses softAP to connect children on other side to make a tree view of Mesh.

This is all nice and working.

My goal is to enable a low power device as a leaf node in ESP Mesh Lite. May be once in a 60-sec communicating device or so. I thought of enabling a leaf node feature of the ESP-Mesh-Lite and see how much the leaf node consumes current. Looks like the ESP-Mesh-Lite doesn't support low power devices even as edge nodes (leaf nodes) due to its bridge functionality which makes SoftAP always ON even in leaf node devices. So i tried following two experiments.

1. There is a define to make a device as a Leaf Node

When the mesh lite configuration is defined for a node using the below statement, there is an argument in the configuration to tell to make the device as a leaf node ( .leaf_node = LEAF_NODE, in the esp_mesh_lite_config_t), i have defined this to be true in the configuration and it has taken correctly i can printed the value and see when executed using esp_mesh_lite_is_leaf_node() function

esp_mesh_lite_config_t mesh_lite_config = ESP_MESH_LITE_DEFAULT_INIT();

I was expecting he will not take any children and his SoftAP role is disabled here but that is not the case, it is working like same router node irrespective of enabling or disabling LeafNode define. So this leaf Node function is latterly not working. Any idea?

2. Since the leaf node define functionality is not working as expected, i have limited the number of levels to 2 in the mesh (.max_level = CONFIG_MESH_LITE_MAXIMUM_LEVEL_ALLOWED) expecting second level node to not to route. This is working in a way that he is not allowing any devices to join to his SoftAP which is good. But softAP seems to be still advertising and functioning, which is really not required to function when it is at highest layer allowed.
Because of this, the radio receiver seems to be always ON due to SoftAP enabled in any configuration of the Mesh Lite node, the current consumed by the end leaf node which is not routing is > 100mA exactly similar to the routing node which is also consuming > 100mA average current.

Anybody experimented with this? Is it possible to enable Low Power devices in the Mesh Lite as end nodes at all? For that to work i believe we need to disable the SoftAP function in the end nodes of Mesh Lite.

Regards
Prasad