The serial interface to the Bluetooth mesh stack provides a way for external devices to interact with a device running the Bluetooth mesh stack via a serial port. The interface is based on the nRF8001 interface and runs a simple length-opcode-data format for both commands and events.
At bootup, the nRF5 sends a "Device started" event, after which it is ready to receive commands from the host.
Each command from the host to the nRF5 gets a command response event in return, except for the echo command, which gets an echo response.
A detailed overview over all serial commands and events can be found in Serial commands and Serial events.
The serial interface uses a set of status codes to communicate the result of a command. A list of potential status codes can be found in Serial status codes.
All serial commands, responses, and events are encapsulated in serial packets that use the format detailed in the following table. All multi-byte values are sent in little-endian format.
| Field | Size (bytes) | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Length | 1 | Length of the serial command, response, or event. Does not include the length field itself. |
| Opcode | 1 | Opcode of the serial command, response, or event. |
| Payload | 0-n | Parameters or data of the command. |
The standard serial packet transfer parameters are as follows:
To communicate with a device running the serial interface, you can use an interactive Python script. See Interactive PyACI script to get started.