ElegantOTA VS Arduino-HomeKit-ESP8266

As u/__deeetz__ pointed out, the esp32 already had a good OTA mechanism, and there are some libraries that simplify the whole process - probably one of the more popular ones is ElegantOTA: https://github.com/ayushsharma82/ElegantOTA If I understand what you're doing correctly, you'll really have just 2 layers, not 3 - one being your application (which effectively has the Kernel/OS compiled in), and then your scripting/LUA component. Technically the ESP32 also has a bootloader portion, but it's pretty uncommon to need to modify that in any way, so I would highly recommend against doing that. As far as dealing with the LUA scripts - you can easily download and run those - you'll store them into NV ram, and I believe the current recommended format is LittleFS. Keep in mind that on a normal ESP32 configured to do OTA updates there's 4MB of storage, 2x 1.8MB for the two bootable images, and ~200k for the file system (in this case LittleFS). There are also other boards which come with more flash memory, like the new S3R8 has 16MB of flash, so your OTA partitions stay about the same in most cases, but you now have ~12MB of storage, which I suspect would be way beyond anything you'd need for storing LUA.

I'm looking for a small, thin example of the ESP32 hosting a webserver to accept firmware update files for OTA updates. There's a handful of Arduino libraries that do exactly this (e.g. https://github.com/ayushsharma82/ElegantOTA) but I haven't come across anything clean that's just built around IDF.

The feeling of creating your own accessories is awesome! Though, I have been using Arduino-HomeKit-ESP8266, cause an ESP32 feels like overkill.

Are you into programming? If yes look at this lib: Arduino-HomeKit-ESP8266 Otherwise you can setup a Raspberry Pi with HomeBridge or ioBroker with the yahka-adapter. But that's probably only worth it if you want to add more accessoires in the future.

Hey, i tried to turn on an LED through the apple home app and it worked perfectly. I tried tweaking the code a bit and it stopped working so i went back to the original code ( that worked in the first place ) and it never worked the again even when i use it untouched straight from the examples i got from - https://github.com/Mixiaoxiao/Arduino-HomeKit-ESP8266 - So what may be the problem? I am making sure that i am setting the wifi SSID and password correctly. Can it be because the board i am using is cheap ( from ali express ). I am using an esp32.

I used an Arduino, heatpumpir, and HomeKit ESP8266, it works great

https://github.com/Mixiaoxiao/Arduino-HomeKit-ESP8266 you mentioned above, is a port of the espressif lib to nonos/arduino core. It shares the wolfssl lib used by espressif, but as it is portrd to nonos, wifi disconnects during srp and devices cannot connect to it. There’s an improved version here: https://github.com/Yurik72/ESPHap which have patched wolfssl that I have changed to prevent wifi disconnections on SRP calculations. Yuri (the Author) made a great job improving original port, like memory management, moving pairings storage to the file, and so on. It still has wolfssl, which is at least redundant as arduino core already have bearssl bundled. Also, this lib has a memory leak during the pairing process, which is not so important as pairing usually made just once. I am currently trying to find where this leak is, but looks like it is somewhere in between the lib and wolfssl. So, I’d like to replace wolfssl with bundled bearssl, if I’d have a free tome to do that.

From there, you can use a standard 12V power pack connected to an ESP8266 (eBay, like $10). You can flash these with a homekit compatible firmware (https://github.com/Mixiaoxiao/Arduino-HomeKit-ESP8266), and you magically have a Homekit powered lock ..

I have found another solution. I am going to send a pulse using an esp8266 and a relay. The esp8266 can be made HomeKit enabled. If somebody is interested here is a link to a GitHub project

There’s also this project

this was written specifically to work with the NodeMCU in the picture.