I guess that would be bad wording on my account. Never been very articulate…
What do you mean by ‘raw’? It allows you to read/write/listen for notifications on GATT characteristics. This is regardless of the characteristics themselves, as it’s actually agnostic to them. I does have an additional layer to convert UUIDs to names and parse known characteristics by their type as defined in the BLE GATT spec. You can also add your own definitions in the configuration file. I find that’s simpler to work with than byte arrays.
Most peripherals only support one central at a time but the central can connect to many peripherals. The ESP32 (with the configuration in my project) supports up to 7 peripherals simultaneously but I admit I’ve never had so many connected at one time. My setup usually has 4 devices connected to each ESP32. If the connection drops for some reason, there’s another ESP32 nearby to pick up the slack. Since the ESP’s with an AC to DC converter are pretty cheap (~4 USD combined), I just have a bunch of them spread around.
Anyways, regardless of which solution you choose, I’d be happy for any suggestions you might have to improve the project.