NimBLE Host Only over HCI UART

[trail-coffee]

Description

I would like to be able to use the NimBLE host only stack over HCI UART H4 to communicate to an ESP32 Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chip.

I'd like to use a samd21 Arduino-nano-33-iot host with a WifiNina W102 ESP32 controller communicating through HCI over Uart.

Useful links

Basing my assumption that this doesn't exist on NimBLE maintainer at RIOT convention saying something like "future: more host support" and me not being able to figure out how to turn on nimble host and set the uart.

https://youtu.be/gK_OPeBs6dQ

[Citrullin]

How about the other way around? Upgrading the ESP32 Nimble stack to support IPv6 over BLE?
So, you just use UDP/TCP and even have multi-hop. It's just more of a future proof approach than using HCI UART.
You "just" have to merge mainline nimble into the ESP32 fork. The whole Arduino ecosystem would probably also benefit from IPv6 over BLE support on common ESP32 variants.

[trail-coffee]

How about the other way around? Upgrading the ESP32 Nimble stack to support IPv6 over BLE?

Sounds good to me, I just want an easy way to hook up to an app and an Xbox controller.

Wasn't everything supposed to be IPv6 ~10 years ago? 😆 I still don't get an IPv6 from my ISP...

[trail-coffee]

Didn't realize it wasn't implemented in nimble, there's a pending PR so it's coming.

[Citrullin]

Didn't realize it wasn't implemented in nimble, there's a pending PR so it's coming.

That's the wrong NimBLE though. The ESP32 has a fork of NimBLE. So, you have to get them to merge this into their fork as well. Open source is hard, I know.

[trail-coffee]

Didn't realize it wasn't implemented in nimble, there's a pending PR so it's coming.

That's the wrong NimBLE though. The ESP32 has a fork of NimBLE. So, you have to get them to merge this into their fork as well. Open source is hard, I know.

NimBLE on ESP32 already has HCI over uart controller, I just need the host stack on my SAMD21 Arduino (host) to talk to the ESP32 (controller). Not sure how hard dealing with espressif is, they do like making huge changes in their idf that ruin all your existing code, so maybe small changes would be a small ask.