Since some of us are waiting to get hands on this feature i thought i will share some thoughts. Im not expert in ble mesh network (not yet), but i would like to start this discussion.
I see few possible issues to start playing with it because its very new feature. First and hardest to solve issue will be provisioner / controller. I dont know iPhone bluetooth stack, but android bluetooth library does not have option to advertise with PB-ADV (0x29) EIR data type. What this means to us? This means that we wont be able to create android PB-ADV (connectionless) provisioner.
This leave us few options:
- we can build mesh node with PB-GATT (connectable) provisioning,
- we need at least one proxy node, that will let us use PB-ADV provisioned node with android device, but proxy node needs to be provisioned first with PB-GATT,
- we can create provisioning app on esp32 that will let us use PB-ADV.
The same problem is with controller. At least one controller is required to have fully operated mesh network. Again it would be better to have PB-ADV controller, but its not possible on android (not yet), because EIR 0x2A is not supported. It would be nice to hear from iPhone devs if its possible to build provisioner/ controller PB-ADV capable on iPhone.