Custom/Vendor Model Support

[atharv-bhadange]

The Problem

• I want to be able to send custom model data.

Why I want to do this

• I am building a flutter application that can communicate using the Custom/Vendor model which is supported on both Android and iOS nRF SDK.

How I would ideally do this

• It would be good to know if this can be done by only writing dart code and a little native code for both platforms.
• I wasn't able to figure out if the MagicLevelGetStatusData and DoozEpochStatusData are the custom models that I'm looking for.
• If yes, can anyone help me figure out how do I use them to send my Custom model?

What am I asking for help on?

• If this has already been implemented, can anyone point it out for me?
• Else I would be happy to help be able to fix this.

[ghost]

Hello @atharv-bhadange ,

Indeed the vendor models are not exposed in this plugin. Much like #251, exposing this feature from Nordic SDK can be done by extending the current pattern used. It will be about writing Dart code yes, but also native code so the plugin can send/receive more types of msgs.

I can't tell when we could implement this, but we gladly accept contributions of course 😁

[ghost]

The two types of msg you are referencing are only used by DooZ products. You won't be able to use them directly but you can probably do smth similar to unlock your issue. I'm not familiar enough with firmware development to tell you how to do it though !

So better to integrate official APIs

[atharv-bhadange]

I want to contribute to this. Do you have any contributing guidelines for me?
Also, if you could guide me on how are the custom models that Dooz is using can be used to expose the Custom models APIs and what kind of data structure are you sending on the mesh, are you using UInt8 arrays?

[ghost]

Hello @atharv-bhadange ,
We don't have contribution guidelines yet, just fork the plugin and build from master branch 👍
I don't know how to implement custom msg on firmware side, but yes it was built on top of generic levels, using new opcodes and adding more data in the msg. The type of data differ based on the firmware implementation but yes it's usually some sequence of bytes arrays.

To integrate the official API you gotta check Nordic's source code and see how they define Vendor Model msgs, after that it will be about "telling" the plugin how to send/receive these types of msgs (recognizing msg opcode and instantiating the corresponding class for example).

Try to understand the in/out flow for a simple Generic Level msg and then it's about doing almost the same flow but with new messages opcodes (I can't be 100% sure that this is the only thing to do)

[atharv-bhadange]

Hey! Thanks for the suggestions, I will work on this and keep you posted.

[FarhanRiaaz]

@atharv-bhadange: Did you find any solution to your problem?

[bslisowski]

I currently have this implemented on android. Unfortunately, I'm not sure this is possible to do on iOS without having to change the native code to match your specific vendor model.