Do the Ble Mesh program support GATT interface now?

[Mitch996]

Hi, around July Nordic Semiconductor released this SDK which featured examples of BLE mesh that uses a dev board as provisioner.

This program is OK, but it has zero possibility of switching the role between provisioner and provisionee, moreover, since it uses advertising packets, it is impossible to communicate with any node using GATT, which requires advertising communication prior to establishing the GATT connection.

So how are things now? I haven't been following everything for a while. ideally, this is what I want:

I want to be able to provision an entire mesh network using a random node of the mesh network.

And this is how I think it could be done:

We all know it's quite impossible at this point to use iPad or Android phone as provisioner. So it would be great if I can connect to any node first using advertising packets, then establish GATT (you know, the usual), and then I can send some commands over using GATT which turns this random node that I just connected into a provisioner, and then provision the entire network, once I'm done, this node that I just disconnected will be restored to its previous state, and then if there is a need, I can do this routine again on a different random node.

So my questions:

• Is what described above available now?
• If not, is there a plan to implement what I described? When will it be ready (if it can be revealed)?
• Please kindly provide relevant information.

[David Edwin]

The typical answer would be see if PB-GATT support is available for the BTLE mesh. This is not available as of the 0.10.1 release.

The approach that you have suggested is reasonable and the pieces needed for it are already available.

1. connect to the node over GATT, and access the provisioner over the GATT interface as a proxy. the proxy just maps your GATT based messages to provisioner messages.

app on phone Node running provisioner, GATT Server and BTLE peripheral You will need to write the code that proxies the provisioning calls over GATT.

Additional notes: You will need to do provisioning using PB-ADV for nodes that are within advertising range and use the remote provisioning for the nodes that are out of range (i.e. needs to hop using already provisioned nodes), this means you will need to proxy both types of provisioning.

[David Edwin]

The timesharing mechanisms are already in place for BTLE Central(GATT)/Peripheral(GATT)/Mesh (i.e, they already work together) , you only have to focus on the application layer to route provisioning events/commands between Mesh and GATT.