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?
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 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:
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.
as a little side project (since i’m also interested in using that board, i have one of the earlier version with 4mb flash) i’ve managed to build esphome and flash it on the s3, and successfully talk to the h2 with rcp firmware and HA correctly recognize it.
once i polish things up a bit i’m gonna publish the alpha version of the custom component for it so people can test it.
