multiple clients and one server in Bluetooth mesh application

[davidm]

What I want to accomplish

I want to create a bluetooth mesh application. I want one board  to act as a server and 12 or more other boards acting as clients. Each client will have 4 buttons and upon pushing one button on the client,will send send a ON status should  to the server. So basically all the clients will send messages to the server when a button is pushed.

 

My understanding/Assumptions

Please correct my understanding if is wrong..My understanding is since the documentation mentions each element acting as a virtual entity in the mesh with its own unique unicast address  and  only one model instance per element can implement a handler for a specific message opcode(in this case  SIMPLE_ON_OFF_OPCODE_SET)

So for my 12 client nodes (each with 4 buttons) I would need to declare 4 elements in each node.That means for 12 client nodes each with 4 elements, On a server node I will have to instantiate 48 elements each implementing a handler for OPCODE_SET.

Questions

How would I know  a message came from this a certain node and element? 

How would this work at the time of configuration, in other words will I have to give one publication address for all 48 elements or just 12 nodes?

I am sure there is a better way to do it, please advise.

[davidm]

Thank you Bjørn Kvaale   I will go with mesh mobile App. Do you happen to know where in the library they save the provision nodes and I will pick up from there.

[Bjørn Kvaale]

Are you referring to the nRF Mesh iOS or Android app? I will take a look once I know which app you want to know more about.

[davidm]

My apologies I thought I mentioned. I mean nRF Mesh Android App.

[Bjørn Kvaale]

No worries! My guess would be somewhere here.

[EAn]

Greetings! Bjørn Kvaale Isn't there a way to achieve this same type of information mapping using, for instance one of the mesh nodes that could act as a client/provisioner to all other nodes and therefore keep all the mesh information which could then be backed up through either a BLE<>cloud gateway, or a WiFi network coprocessor?

If so, what API calls would we need to get the necessary information to be able to reconstruct the network (network key, app keys, device keys, device constitution (elements+models+addresses) etc...) ?

In real-case scenarios you don't always have a device that can speak Python to extract the information in the way you suggest, and in some use-cases you might not want an App that connects via BLE....

Thank you very much!