If you run Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi with the ESPHome add-on, you’ve probably watched compile progress crawl — large ESP32 projects can take several minutes on the Pi. I found a one-time setup that cut my build times by roughly 10x (~35s per build), and it’s an officially supported feature: pairing the add-on with a desktop ESPHome Builder.
What it does
After a one-time pairing, the add-on’s builds are delegated to the desktop’s ESPHome instance over the network. The add-on sends the config bundle, the desktop compiles it (ESP-IDF toolchain lives there), and the result is returned for OTA upload. Compile time drops from minutes on the Pi to tens of seconds on the desktop. Looking at the build log you’ll see the compiled path under ~/.esphome/.remote_builds/ on the desktop — that’s how you know it’s delegating.
How to set it up
- Install and open the ESPHome dashboard on a desktop machine on the same network.
- In the HA ESPHome add-on, use the remote builder / pair option and follow the pairing flow to connect it to the desktop dashboard.
- Confirm pairing in both UIs.
- Compile anything — the add-on should now show the remote build path.
Notes
- Pairing is a one-time step. It persists across reboots; no need to repeat it.
- You still edit YAML and manage devices from the HA add-on as before — the desktop is just a build backend.
- It works great for bigger devices (ESP32/IDF projects); the toolchain overhead is what it offloads best.
I’m on HA OS on a Raspberry Pi 4 with an M5Stack Core2 (ESP-IDF framework) and the difference was night and day. If you’ve been avoiding frequent firmware iterations because of build times, this is worth doing.