RIOT VS HomeSpan

RIOT-OS is somewhat popular in academia, it tries to be very approachable but there are still plenty of low hanging fruits with all kinds of hardware and you can use it for software and thesis projects.

Just one example: https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT

You could also take a look at RIOT-OS. http://riot-os.org

RIOT-OS has a lot of unit tests for all the boards they support. And it's written in C. https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/tree/master/tests

Another option is using RIOT-OS. But that unfortunately doesn't support PWM for the Weact. It does support PWM for the Bluepill and Blackpill STM32f103 and the Nucleo-f446 After quick search. \ https://riot-os.org

If you want to use C, I would suggest trying out RIOT-OS. It's a modern embedded operating system, written in C and focussed on IOT. It works on a lot of different boards. https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT

Alternatively, you can also write your code in an RTOS. They often have scripts that make flashing and debugging easy. One that I personally like, and also supports Arduino, is RIOT-OS.

and https://github.com/HomeSpan/HomeSpan

You can check out Homespan. Together with an ESP32 you can mostly hook it up with whatever appliance you want. Some soldering/tinkering might be neccesary though, but it’s really great.

If you have an iPhone or iPad you can even do it through apple's HomeKit using the HomeSpan library for ESP32-Arduino. It's really well documented and that way you don't have to program a new app for your phone in addition to the esp32 code.

Also, for esp32 the situation is much better. As arduino core for esp32 is rtos based, it is possible to simply use espressif hap sdk from arduino corr or directly from bundled RTOS. Esp32 is much faster, SRP, which is the most time consuming, takes a second on it, while it could take up to 20+ seconds on esp8266. There’s also a nice HomeSpan app example for esp32/arduino https://github.com/HomeSpan/HomeSpan. Author calls it “library”, but it is more like a complete app, which can be highly customized and, I suppose, it is also possible to reuse just a necessary parts of it, just like a library.