ESP-Hosted Firmware

Pre-built ESP-Hosted-MCU co-processor firmware binaries

Overview

The slave firmware enables host MCUs to utilize the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities of ESP32 series chips through SDIO, SPI, or UART interfaces.

Supported Co-processors and Transports

The following table summarizes the supported co-processors and transport communication buses between the slave and host.

Transport Supported	SDIO	SPI Full-Duplex	SPI Half-Duplex	UART
Co-Processors Supported
ESP32	✓	✓	×	✓
ESP32-C2	×	✓	✓	✓
ESP32-C3	×	✓	✓	✓
ESP32-C5	✓	✓	✓	✓
ESP32-C6/C61	✓	✓	✓	✓
ESP32-S21	×	✓	✓	✓
ESP32-S3	×	✓	✓	✓

Usage

Download the appropriate firmware binary for your co-processor from the Releases page.

You can also use the firmware files hosted on the project's GitHub Pages site for over-the-air (OTA) updates to the co-processor. The workflow publishes the latest release .bin files to GitHub Pages (https://pioarduino.github.io/esp-hosted-mcu-firmware); point your co-processor's OTA URL to the desired .bin file (for example: https://pioarduino.github.io/esp-hosted-mcu-firmware/network_adapter_esp32c6.bin).

Building Locally

To build the firmware locally:

# Clone ESP-IDF
git clone -b v5.5.1 --recursive https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf.git
cd esp-idf
./install.sh esp32c6  # or your target
source export.sh
cd ..

# Create project from ESP-Hosted example
idf.py create-project-from-example "espressif/esp_hosted==2.7.3:slave"
cd slave/

# Build for your target
idf.py set-target esp32c6  # or your target
idf.py build

# Output: build/network_adapter.bin

Versioning

Releases are tagged with the ESP-Hosted-MCU version used (e.g., v2.7.3).

License

The ESP-Hosted-MCU firmware is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. See the ESP-Hosted-MCU repository for details.

Footnotes

1. Build currently fails due to an incorrect default configuration ↩