Adventures with #thread: This is a ESP32-S3 with W5500 Ethernet. It has a UART connection to a small ESP32-C6 running Openthread RCP firmware.
The S3 is running a full openthread border router with NAT64 and web interface, currently forming its own network. Have to figure out how to join it to my existing network next.
All software is espressif‘s sample implementations configured and compiled locally.
So after 100 combinations of "ot reset" "ot factoryreset" "ot dataset set active ..." and "ot dataset commit" the esp32 otbr keeps it's dataset in NVS.
I now have a working embedded ESP32 ethernet thread border router 🥳. I obviously prefer this to apple/google/amazon cloud connected thread border routers.
Now i need to design a case and retire the otbr haos add-on and USB radio. And automate the build process in #forgejo CI.
The https://github.com/espressif/esp-thread-br project is optimized for Espressif's ESP Thread Border Router pcb - which I don't own.
The RCP update logic is disabled so reset/boot are not needed. The radio coexistence pins are not needed when using ethernet and i opted for UART instead of SPI so there's really just TX/RX and power to connect between the two boards.
This should be a nice "cheap esp32 thread border router" open source project with a bit of polish🤔.
