We are developing a mesh lighting application.
We have hundreds of identical nodes.
Currently we are provisioning them manually using the nRF Mesh App: this is of course the basic option, but we believe that this approach can be useful for initial experimentation and to start understanding the Mesh concepts and functionalities.
Our next goal is to streamline the provisioning process: in a close future we will need to do this by mean of a Gateway that will be able to collect all the unprovisioned nodes and add them to a new network. Moreover the final goal will be to collect and to provision all the reachable nodes through the mesh itself: that is once the gateway will complete the provisioning of all the close nodes (=the ones reachable with a single hop) it will start provisioning the remotes ones using the remote provisioning server and client, (By the way: we saw an implementation example inside the old nRF5 SDK, a nRFConnect example would be very appreciated, but it is not the topic of this tiket).
The gateway is a far to big and complicated device to be fitted inside a Nordic chip, we need to do this using a bigger machine (most likely a Linux box) Moreover we need to develop, test and debug these procedures, hence we need an effective approach to work on this functionalities.
Of course one could try to work with a Nordic SoC with a provisioning Client and write all the logic inside it, but this is too cumbersome and not effective for us.
Our wish is to have some kind of provisioning API exposed in an high level language running on a real world PC. What we also need is to have the same approach to send and receive Mesh messages with a convenient API, again running on a regular PC. This will be needed for a Gateway to listen and send Mesh messages once the network will be provisioned.
A few years ago (2019) I attended a workshop where we discussed this challenges and the available option was the PyACI: Provisioning and running Nordic's BLE Mesh with Python Application Controller Interface (PyACI). Such a similar approach would be great for our development!!
Today we are working with nRF Connect 2.5.0 Toolchain/SDK: what is the correct and suggested approach? Can you share some relevant implementation example?
May be we need to build a nRF52840 project that will proxy every API endpoint through a UART interface, and then write all the
