Zephyr RTOS on ESP32

ESP32 is a popular family of low-cost and connected SoCs. It is popular amongst hobbyists, and it is also used in commercial applications.

History

• The first ESP32 support on Zephyr RTOS was available in 2017 on Zephyr v1.9.0. Only a basic set of peripherals was supported (I2C, GPIO, UART), and applications could only run from SRAM.
• Espressif started to contribute to the work in 2021.
• hal_espressif is based on the modified version of ESP-IDF
• The IDF versions used in the Zephyr were: v4.3, v4.4, v5.1
• Recent versions of hal_espressif are made with an emphasis on more flexible updates and new SoC support

Current development status

The complete support status is tracked in the following GitHub issue: https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/issues/29394

Getting started guide

The generic Zephyr Getting Started Guide can be used to set up the development environment, with only a few ESP32-specific steps.

https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/develop/getting_started/index.html

After the “Install the Zephyr SDK” step, fetch and update the binary blobs needed to build the Wi-Fi applications:

$ west blobs fetch hal_espressif

More information can be obtained from the ESP32 based boards’ documentation.

Here are a few examples of boards maintained by the Espressif Systems:

• esp32_devkitc_wroom
• esp32_devkitc_wrover
• esp32s2_saola
• esp32s3_devkitm
• esp32c3_devkit
• …

To get a complete list of ESP32 based boards take a look here:

https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/xtensa/index.html

https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/riscv/index.html

Further information

Don’t hesitate and check out the Discord channel to get in touch with ESP32 Zephyr developers!