Espressif fans who are already familiar with ESP-IDF are aware that this is ESP32’s official development framework, which was initially published in December 2016. Since then, ESP-IDF has been optimized with newer versions. After releasing version 2.1.1 in December 2017, we published ESP-IDF v3.0 at the end of April 2018. The list of major changes includes:

• Improvement to the stability of the Wi-Fi/BT/LwIP stacks
• Improved throughput for UDP (60Mbps TX/RX) and TCP (35Mbps RX, 50Mbps TX)
• LwIP and Wi-Fi parameters which can be configured via menuconfig
• ESPNOW support for point-to-point connectionless 802.11 data transfer
• New WiFi scan options and support for regional regulatory restrictions
• Improvement to BT/BLE stack compatibility 
• Improvement to the BLE connection success rate and RX performance
• Support for external PSRAM, including options to enable heap in external PSRAM, with optional transparent malloc() for large buffers
• New efficient heap memory implementation, with debugging features for memory leaks and memory corruption
• Many FreeRTOS 9.0 features which have been backported
• Boot time optimizations
• pthread compatibility library
• C++ concurrency (std::condition_variable, std::mutex, etc.) and exceptions support
• ADC calibration
• New power saving features, such as light sleep and dynamic frequency scaling, and better modem sleep performance
• New debugging features, such as tracing and coverage analysis over JTAG
• GCC stack smashing protection
• New examples for BLE, WiFi, and peripherals

Our goal in putting together the third version of ESP-IDF has been to integrate software libraries and support for networking protocols, along with any requirements that developers have highlighted as particularly important to them when building their programs. We are confident that ESP-IDF v3.0 has adequately addressed the issues of the previous versions, but we intend to continue making our development framework constantly better. Improvements will take both the form of major releases with new functionality and bug fixes backported to the present release.

All the details about ESP-IDF v3.0 can be found in the following link: https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/releases/tag/v3.0  

The ESP-IDF Programming Guide can be found at: http://esp-idf.readthedocs.io/en/v3.0/ 

Additionally, the ESP32 online forum is a place where you can ask anything about ESP32 and discover more ESP32-related resources. If you happen to find any bugs in the code or have further requirements, please let us know by creating a “new issue” on Espressif’s platform on Github. If you are interested in contributing code to ESP-IDF, you are more than welcome to do so, but, please, review our Contribution Guide first.