FYI: a developer begun porting ESPHome to nrf52 for nRF52840

[Hedda]

Off-topic but FYI; @tomaszduda23 has started working on an initial (basic) port of ESPHome for nRF Connect / nRF5 SDK (for nRF52840) as well as Zigbee support (for nRF) on that platform. See these pull requests:

• [nrf52, zigbee] zigbee binary_sensor, switch and time esphome/esphome#7340

• [nrf52, core] nrf52 core based on zephyr esphome/esphome#7049

He is developing most of it in his "nrf52" branch in his fork of ESPHome:

https://github.com/tomaszduda23/esphome/tree/nrf52

Related as he made short a post informing about this in ESPHome's feature request discussion for Zigbee and Thread support:

esphome/feature-requests#1397 (comment)

"I've started porting esphome to nRF52840 a few weeks ago esphome/esphome#6075. It can be used with nrf-sdk which has some zigbee examples https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-nrf/tree/main/samples/zigbee. I've not looked in zigbee details. Maybe someone would be interested though."

That development effort might also be an interesting sub-project to follow for those who (like myself) have been asking for Zigbee (and Thread) support in ESPHome (and perhaps posted in the feature request tracker) since Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 does not support WiFi but does support both Zigbee and Thread protocols, (similar to the ESP32-H2).

[Hedda]

@ffenix113 still off-topic but another indirectly related FYI; @tomaszduda23 has now created a Zigbee proof-of-concept for ESPHome on nRF52840 with YAML config here -> tomaszduda23/esphome#2

[Hedda]

@ ffenix113 FYI, the same developer have now submitted a PR for initialZigbee support to ESPHome

• [nrf52, zigbee] zigbee binary_sensor, switch and time esphome/esphome#7340

That in turn require his PR to add nRF52 support to Zephyr for ESPHome:

• [nrf52, core] nrf52 core based on zephyr esphome/esphome#7049

[Hedda]

FYI, tomaszduda23 keep making great progress towards the path to add both nrf52 platform core (based on Zephyr) and Zigbee for nRF to the ESPHome firmware (developed for the nRF52840 MCU SoC chip):

• [nrf52, zigbee] zigbee binary_sensor, switch and time esphome/esphome#7340

• [nrf52, core] nrf52 core based on zephyr esphome/esphome#7049

That custom nrf52 platform be an external component:

• [core] add support for custom platform esphome/esphome#7616

PS: His previous Zigbee proof-of-concept example for ESPHome on nRF52840 with YAML config for reference here:

• Zigbee tomaszduda23/esphome#2

[Hedda]

@ffenix113 FYI, initial pull requests for nrf52 core (based on zephyr) from tomaszduda23 has now been merged into ESPHome dev branch:

• [nrf52, core] nrf52 core based on zephyr esphome/esphome#7049

plus many more new related nrf52 patches are in development now that the initial support has been added and will soon be in the mainline:

• https://github.com/esphome/esphome/pulls?q=is%3Apr+nrf52+

And more revevant is that the initial pull request for Zigbee support on nrf52 for ESPHome is now also getting close to being merged soon:

• [nrf52, zigbee] zigbee binary_sensor, switch and time esphome/esphome#7340

PS: Also noted that luar123 has begun working on an external low-level Zigbee component support for ESPHome on Espressif ESP32 as well:

• https://github.com/luar123/zigbee_esphome