Functioning mesh of DK, Thingy:52, Feathers and Lamps - how to tap into it from Pi and interact with subscriptions/publications?

[HeneryH]

So i have my nRF5340 DK and have been pretty successful in getting my Mesh working with some Thingy:52 devices, some Adafruit Feather devices and some Sengled Lamps.

Groovy!

But now I want to tap into that Mesh and interact with things on the outside of the mesh.  Maybe the same type of things that come up when talking about a Mesh/Ethernet gateway. 

Or a MQTT bridge.  Or HomeAssistant integration.

All of those would be predicated on the core problem I have to tackle first is how to even subscribe or publish from a full blown os device like a Pi?

I already have a Pi4 with a recompiled kernel, BlueZ and meshcrl but I don't know how to tackle subscribing to some events.  I think meshctl was a good test case to make sure my Pi had the basics but maybe not what I need to subscribe to a network that is already created via a smartphone.

Any leads on where to find helpful docs?

[Mttrinh]

Hi,

Do you want to use your Pi to be apart of the mesh or get mesh messages through a gateway via bluetooth for example?

Can you elaborate more? Im a bit confused to what you wanna achieve here.

[HeneryH]

I want to use an automation mechanism such as Node-Red scenarios/flow to act upon various stimuli from the mesh.

For instance, if a Device A publishes X and conditions A, B and C are true then I want to respond by publishing W to the Group.

So basically my Node-Red scenario needs to subscribe and publish via my pi.

In a non-mesh ecosystem there are some open source gateway servers that translate BLE Advertisements to MQTT.  Not that this is the answer here, but something similar.

[Mttrinh]

HeneryH said:

So basically my Node-Red scenario needs to subscribe and publish via my pi.

I think I understand what you are trying to do, but still, do you want the Pi to be a part of the network as a node or be able to communicate with the mesh outside of the mesh network? Do you want the PI to send bluetooth mesh packets or "normal" BLE packets?

[HeneryH]

I think publish and subscribe from the pi should be all that is needed for my use case.  So as long as those two would be possible then either being part of or not being part of would be OK.

[Mttrinh]

Hi,

Since this is related to rPi and BlueZ, and not strictly related to our Mesh SDKs perhaps it will be better to ask this question on the zephyr discord channel.