Bluetooth Gateways In The Field: The Ezurio Sentrius MG100

Golioth’s Bluetooth-to-Cloud development continues to roll out new features for private access users, including offering a range of solutions for shuttling bluetooth data up to the cloud. As more customers build sensor-rich devices for agriculture, smart buildings, and asset tracking, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is the protocol of choice for low-power, short-range communication. But there’s still a missing piece in many deployments: how do you reliably bridge BLE sensors to the cloud with off-the-shelf options?

That’s where Bluetooth gateways come in.

Over the past few months, we’ve been evaluating a variety of BLE gateways, some that pair with Wi-Fi or Ethernet, others that speak cellular, and running them through their paces with Golioth. Our goal was simple: find a reliable, flexible, and developer-friendly solution that we can confidently recommend to customers building BLE-enabled fleets.

Defining a Great BLE Gateway

At Golioth, we think of networks in terms of devices (your sensors and actuators) and gateways (the last hop to the cloud). Gateways can be:

• Managed — fully onboarded in Golioth with OTA updates, logging, settings, and policy control.

• Unmanaged — authenticated to Golioth but only relaying data for endpoints that don’t run our SDK.

A gateway is any device that connects directly to Golioth, typically over cellular, Wi-Fi, or Ethernet, and forwards traffic for local BLE nodes. For the newest Bluetooth-to-Cloud capabilities, that means the gateway needs to be able to forward data wrapped in Pouch, our new innovation in the space of non-IP communication. It’s also possible for Gateways to forward non-Pouch traffic, but we’ll be focusing on the most enhanced version of data transfer (ie. Pouch) for the near future.

The BLE Gateway Landscape

You’ll find plenty of Zephyr-compatible dev boards, Nordic’s nRF9160 DK and the Thingy91:X among them that technically fit the bill. We love these boards for rapid prototyping and POCs: they pair the nRF52840’s BLE prowess with an nRF91 Series LTE-M/NB-IoT modem.

But most teams aren’t in the business of maintaining custom hardware stacks. They want a turnkey gateway that just works. That’s why, even though you can cobble together a solution from dev boards, we don’t recommend it for production.

Our Top Pick: Ezurio Sentrius MG100

After testing, we recommend the Sentrius MG100 from Ezurio for industrial BLE + cellular deployments. Here’s why:

• Zephyr-Ready: First-class support in Golioth’s Zephyr SDK, so you can hit the ground running.

• Proven Hardware: nRF52840 for BLE Central; Sierra HL7800 for LTE-M/NB-IoT.

• Off-the-Shelf Reliability: No soldering irons or custom enclosures, just unbox and deploy.

• Customizable: Optional branding and packaging, so it fits right into your product lineup.

With the MG100 + Golioth, you get a hardened, field-ready gateway that delivers the “set-and-forget” experience you and your customers expect.

Next Up: BLE + Wi-Fi/Ethernet Gateways

A microcontroller-based cellular device in an industrial enclosure doesn’t fit every application space. In our next post, we’ll explore the world of BLE + Wi-Fi/Ethernet gateways, as well as discussing more about the processing needs of particular gateways.

We’re continuing to enhance our BLE gateway tooling, improve reference firmware, and if you are building a connected product, sign up for Golioth’s Bluetooth-to-Cloud Connectivity private access program, or join us in the forum to tell us more about your use case!