BLE mesh provisioning using another vendor's app

[flyingbed]

Hi,

I searched devzone and it looks like the Nordic mesh PB-GATT will be available sometime this year. However I'm wondering if it's possible to use Silab's BLE mesh Android app to perform provisioning with the Nordic mesh lighting example? Or is it incompatible?

Best regards

[Hung Bui]

If the Siliab follows Bluetooth Sig spec properly, we should be able to talk to each other. However, provisioning is application specific so you need to either modify the app or your application to match what should be exchanged in the configuration phase.

[leonwj]

hello flyingbed,

As you have determined, the Nordic Mesh stack currently only supports the PB-ADV bearer. Unfortunately, the Silicon Labs BLE Mesh Android app currently (as of v.1.0.2) only supports the PB-GATT bearer so it will not be able to provision the Nordic Mesh lighting example.

We have had success using the Silabs BLE Mesh Android app to provision nrf52-xxx nodes based on the Zephyr RTOS mesh stack (obviously using the PB-GATT bearer) but the Silabs app does have some limitations based upon the number of vendor models implemented and OOB (out-of-band) security.

Additionally, we have also had some success getting the Nordic Mesh SDK to provision Zephyr based PB-ADV nodes but for now there are no Android apps that implement provisioning over PB-ADV.

regards,