Rainmaker local control over BLE

[bbinet]

Would it be possible to add support for local control of rainmaker devices over bluetooth instead of http?
I would like some devices to stay offline most of the time (for example when devices are moved to a location where wifi access point is not available anymore) but would still be available locally through bluetooth.

[Piyush]

While this could be feasible, given that the esp_local_control itself also supports BLE, we had faced some technical challenges due to the high memory consumption by the BLE stack, the larger payloads for node config and sharing of BLE resources by the provisioning and local control framework and so did not include that in the standard offering. It is still a lower priority for us, but worth giving a shot. Will have to check the challenges on phone app side as well

[DevinLeoo]

While this could be feasible, given that the esp_local_control itself also supports BLE, we had faced some technical challenges due to the high memory consumption by the BLE stack, the larger payloads for node config and sharing of BLE resources by the provisioning and local control framework and so did not include that in the standard offering. It is still a lower priority for us, but worth giving a shot. Will have to check the challenges on phone app side as well

I have the same question. Is it possible to switch between Rainmaker and Nimble modes on the ESP32S3, enabling BLE communication for mobile ESP devices in environments without WiFi? Has there been any progress on this issue?

[Piyush]

I have a basic BLE local control workflow running with the RainMaker CLI, but it only works when the device is in provisioning mode. Once provisioned, it continues with the regular workflow: MQTT for remote control and HTTP for local control over Wi-Fi. We may release it soon for trials.

[Piyush]

A form of BLE local control has been added in esp-rainmaker in this commit. It is part of esp-rainmaker component version 1.10.0.

This can be tested with esp-rainmaker-cli 1.10.0.