ESPHome support for ESP Thread Border Router board (ESP32-S3 + ESP32-H2)?

Hi All

Does ESPHome plan to support the Espressif ESP Thread Border Router Board (ESP32-S3 host + ESP32-H2 RCP) as a ready-made, flashable image or predefined project?


ESP Thread Border Router

Its a very cheap affordable board.

Right now Espressif only provides build-from-source instructions (esp-idf + esp-thread-br, dual firmware, menuconfig, etc.). It works, but it’s quite complex for a fixed, single-purpose board.

A few quick questions:

  • Is this board technically feasible for ESPHome support?
  • Why does Espressif only document how to compile, instead of providing a prebuilt firmware image, given the hardware and feature set are fixed?

A ready-to-flash ESPHome image would make this a great Thread/Matter gateway for Home Assistant.

Curious to hear thoughts from maintainers or anyone familiar with Thread on ESP32.

Thanks!

1 Like

That’s a board.
ESPHome supports both S3 and H2, but how to flash and what to flash is basically out of their scope…

Thanks for the reply, but I think you may have misread my question.

I’m not asking how to flash two separate chips independently—I already know how to do that. The board has two USB ports (one for H2, one for S3), that’s not the issue.

I’m asking about ESPHome’s hosted co-processor architecture, which is already documented and supported:

ESPHome even provides precompiled binaries here:
https://github.com/esphome/esp-hosted-firmware

So it’s very much within their scope—they literally maintain firmware for this exact use case. The gap is that the binaries only cover ESP32 and C6, not S3 or H2.

Bumping this thread in hopes of getting input from someone familiar with ESPHome’s hosted co-processor support or the esp-hosted-firmware repo.

Oh, are you asking for a pre-compiled firmware?
Otherwise, I don’t see what’s the issue…

I’ve explained it in detail in the feature request, give it a read:
https://github.com/orgs/esphome/discussions/3519