Since the beta release of the AWS IoT LTS libraries for ESP32 in August 2021, many of our customers and independent developers have been using them in various projects based on the examples we had initially provided. Now, we are pleased to announce the stable release of esp-aws-iot on GitHub and a reference example for the ESP32-C3, developed in collaboration with the AWS team. The combination of these repositories provides a production-ready starting point for making applications that connect to AWS IoT Core, using esp-aws-iot.

Stable release of esp-aws-iot and reference example

The main characteristics of the stable release are:

1. 1. Closer-to-Production Example

The reference example now provided in addition to the earlier standalone examples provide a better starting point for building production applications. More specifically, the latest reference example is built from the ground up to provide a reliable application that can handle and recover from real-world cases, such as MQTT-level disconnections or Wi-Fi disconnections.

The new reference example also comes with Espressif’s Unified Provisioning that allows you to use our phone apps (available in open-source format for Android on the Google Play Store, and iOS on the Apple App Store) for providing Wi-Fi credentials and sending additional information to the device.

2. Security Best Practices

One of the most important highlights of the reference example is that it is designed according to the best security practices. It also provides a comprehensive guide for following them in production use cases. In particular, the new reference example showcases the Digital Signature Peripheral on the ESP32-C3, which provides a hardware root-of-trust and secure storage for certificates. This ensures that the device identity remains protected by using hardware security.

Additionally, the above-mentioned guide provides steps for security considerations in production, such as enabling Flash Encryption and Secure Boot, which are currently default features in any securely connected device.

3. Combination of AWS Libraries and Features

Most of the real-world scenarios nowadays use a combination of the AWS LTS libraries. To facilitate these use cases, the reference example integrates various libraries, like coreMQTT, coreJSON and AWS OTA.

4. Libraries as Individual IDF Components

As a consequence of restructuring the esp-aws-iot SDK in this context, we now provide the ability to use each AWS LTS library as a standalone ESP-IDF component that can easily be added to any example. Each library comes with its own port layer and configuration that can be easily managed for the application.

Getting Started

Currently, esp-aws-iot is supported to work on the ESP-IDF v4.3 and v4.4 release branches. You can find the steps for installing and setting up ESP-IDF here. Additionally, you can find the stable release of esp-aws-iot here, and the Getting-Started Guide to the reference example for the ESP32-C3 here.

We hope that the stable release of the esp-aws-iot repo and the reference example simplify and speed up the development of your applications connecting to AWS IoT Core. We will make the reference example available for other SoCs shortly.

If you run into any problems, you can file an issue on the respective repos.