Getting Started with the ESP32, Golioth, and Zephyr
Golioth has premier support for certain hardware platforms, including the Espressif ESP32 platform. In this post and associated videos, we will show you how to get started using Golioth and Zephyr on the ESP32 platform.
Re-Introducing Support for the ESP32
Long time Golioth watchers will note that we once had older versions of the videos below on our YouTube channel. Everybody is doing reboot movies these days, right?
We recorded new videos to showcase the updated onboarding process for developers to get started, including directions for getting started using Golioth. Previous videos showed a command line interface as the main way to interface to the Golioth cloud. Then and now, users could use goliothctl to query devices and pull data from the data streams on the Cloud such as LightDB State and LightDB Stream. Since then, the Golioth Console is the recommended way for users to get started. The graphical interface of the Golioth Console makes it even easier to add and provision new devices to a user’s Dev Tier account. A couple of clicks and you have a set of credentials that you can then add to your actual device (in this case, an ESP32).
Now that your device is provisioned, our Getting Started with ESP32 video shows an updated installation of Zephyr RTOS and how it can connect to the Golioth Cloud to send your first “hello” message. This is a walkthrough of our written directions on the topic, available on our docs site. There is a secondary video that shows the full walkthrough of installing the Zephyr toolchain for the ESP32.
Why we like the ESP32 and Zephyr
So why the ESP32? As a hardware designer, I don’t think it shines in any particular area, except for one. It is almost never the lowest power WiFi solution, nor is it the most powerful processor. It’s definitely a low cost processor, but high volume applications often have access to a range of parts that can meet price targets. It’s not the tooling, as it even uses a less common Xtensa core instead of an Arm core. What I like most about it is: you can buy it. In the current chip shortage, we have seen the ESP32 “on the shelves” throughout the time we have been developing.
On the software side, we like that the Espressif team has also enabled Zephyr support. They are still working on adding new features, including MCUboot support, which enables Over-The-Air updates for ESP32 based projects with Golioth. Zephyr is not their primary software support, as Espressif develops ESP-IDF, which is a custom FreeRTOS implementation for ESP32-based parts. While we don’t support ESP-IDF directly in our SDK, we have content coming out soon showing how users can directly connect to the Golioth cloud using ESP-IDF over CoAP. Overall, we like that the Espressif team and the surrounding community is devoted to extending capabilities of their parts to many different types of software and Real Time Operating systems, and giving it back to the community. We try to match this ethos.
Should you try the ESP32?
The ESP32 represents an affordable, available platform for you to try out Golioth on a real device. If you follow our docs or follow along with the videos below, you can expect to have a fully functional IoT device by the end of the tutorials. From there, you can go from a single prototype to scaling up a fleet of thousands of devices without needing a “cloud team” to manage your various services on the cloud.
