Mesh Provisioning: how to streamline provisioning of many identical nodes.

RE: Mesh Provisioning: how to streamline provisioning of many identical nodes.

Edvin — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 14:22:36 GMT

Hello Davide,

I am sorry, but I am not aware of any such plans. I talked to our Bluetooth Mesh team, and they said the following:

Seems like Remote Provisioning is what should help to satisfy the customer requirements. Talking about remote interface, aka PyACI in the nRF5 SDK. The customer can use this if it is not a requirement that the devvice needs to be a Zephyr based solution. They can use Linux solution based on Zephyr API (mesh, host). They can locate the controller on device and HOST+Mesh on PC communicating over serial interface that HCI implementation supports (for example UART). This is Bluetooth architecture in Zephyr (with description of Host-only and Controller-only, meaning:

https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/connectivity/bluetooth/bluetooth-arch.html#bluetooth-build-types

This is how to use QEMU or native POSIX host with controller:

https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/connectivity/bluetooth/bluetooth-tools.html#bluetooth-qemu-native

An alternative, according to the Bluetooth Mesh team can also be to modify the mesh_shell with e.g. UART to funnel messages to/from a pc. This has been done on several occasions, but mostly for demo cases. Mesh shell is not streamlined for the described use case, so I am not sure it is suitable for production.

Best regards,

Edvin

RE: Mesh Provisioning: how to streamline provisioning of many identical nodes.

DavideDN — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:11:12 GMT

thank you for the hint Edvin.

Can you tell me if there are plans to expose an interface more suitable to be used programmatically as an regular API?

Moreover, what is the approach you are suggesting to any company that is going to build a Mesh gateway? I believe that there should be a lot of customers of yours with this kind of need.

Davide

RE: Mesh Provisioning: how to streamline provisioning of many identical nodes.

Edvin — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 14:59:07 GMT

Hello.

There is a shell sample, found in <sdk_folder>\zephyr\tests\bluetooth\mesh_shell, which you can use for provisioning. Check the sample's description here.

Note that this is using serialization, which is intended for human interface, and not scripting. This means that the throughput is not great, so keep that in mind if you intend to use this for scripting. Add sufficient delays.

Best regards,

Edvin