chshu / esp-thread-br

Espressif Thread Border Router SDK

esp-thread-br

esp-thread-br is the official ESP Thread Border Router SDK. It supports all fundamental network features to build a Thread Border Router and integrates rich product level features for quick productization.

Software Components

Currently the OpenThread port and ESP Border Router core implementation is provided as pre-built library in ESP-IDF.

Hardware Platforms

The ESP Thread Border Router consists of two SoCs:

• An ESP32 series Wi-Fi SoC (ESP32, ESP32-C, ESP32-S, etc) loaded with ESP Thread Border Router and OpenThread Stack.
• An ESP32-H 802.15.4 SoC loaded with OpenThread RCP.

ESP Thread Border Router Board

The ESP Thread border router board provides an integrated module of an ESP32-S3 SoC and an ESP32-H2 RCP.

The two SoCs are connected with following interfaces:

• UART and SPI for serial communication
• RESET and BOOT pins for RCP Update
• 3-Wires PTA for RF coexistence

Standalone Modules

The SDK also supports manually connecting an ESP32-H2 RCP to an ESP32 series Wi-Fi SoC.

ESP32 pin	ESP32-H2 pin
GND	G
GPIO17	TX
GPIO18	RX
GPIO4	RST
GPIO5	GPIO9 (BOOT)

The following image shows an example connection between ES32-H2 and ESP32:

In this setup, only UART interface is connected, so it doesn't support RCP Update or RF Coexistence features. You can refer to ot_br example in esp-idf as a quick start.

Provided Features

These features are currently provided by the SDK:

• Bi-directional IPv6 Connectivity: The devices on the backbone link (typically Wi-Fi) and the Thread network can reach each other.
• Service Discovery Delegate: The nodes on the Thread network can find the mDNS services on the backbone link.
• Service Registration Server: The nodes on the Thread network can register services to the border router for devices on the backbone link to discover.
• Multicast Forwarding: The devices joining the same multicast group on the backbone link and the Thread network can be reached with one single multicast.
• RCP Update: The built border router image will contain an updatable RCP image and can automatically update the RCP on version mismatch or RCP failure.

In the future releases, the following features will be added:

• Web GUI
• SPI Communication
• RF Coexistence
• NAT64