ESP32-S3 Board Support — Multi-Board Architecture Goes Live

The Olimex ESP32-S3-DevKit-Lipo is now a fully supported second target board alongside the Pico W. The DevTool, setup CLI, and firmware all handle both boards natively — no forks, no feature flags, just a board selector.

DevTool Changes

The Programs tab gained a Target Board dropdown. Selecting ESP32 switches Deploy Standalone and Flash to use PlatformIO instead of UF2/BOOTSEL. The Connect tab adapts too — it shows CH340X USB-serial steps for ESP32 (including download mode via BOOT + RST buttons) versus the ttyACM workflow for Pico.

Setup CLI

setup.py now accepts --board pico or --board esp32 to filter steps for one board. Without the flag, an interactive board selection menu appears at startup. On Arch/CachyOS, the CLI uses pipx instead of pip install --user to avoid PEP 668 externally-managed-environment errors. The dev setup guide covers both boards side-by-side in every step.

Firmware

PlatformIO handles all ESP32 builds and flashing. Auto-reset via DTR means no BOOTSEL dance — pio run -t upload flashes directly. The firmware compiles with a HAL abstraction layer using extern "C" linkage so C firmware links cleanly against the C++ Arduino-ESP32 SDK. A shared board_config.h provides compile-time pin selection per board. The resulting ESP32 firmware image is 293KB.

What Changed Under the Hood

The CMakeLists.txt gained board-conditional paths. Platform-specific source lives in firmware/src/platform/esp32s3/ with HAL implementations for GPIO, SPI, and timing. The build system picks the right HAL at compile time based on the target board — same application code, different hardware interface.