ESPHome 2025.6.0 Brings Espressif ESP32-P4 Compatibility, Initial OpenThreads Support

The ESPHome project, which produces a firmware designed to put Espressif microcontrollers into home automation setups with a minimum of fuss, has announced a new release — adding support for Espressif's powerful ESP32-P4 chip and initial compatibility with Thread networks.

"In this release, we have updated the [Espressif] ESP-IDF framework to version 5.3.2," the project maintainers explain of ESPHome 2025.6.0. "This version has been thoroughly tested in the background by our development team and is now the default for all configurations using ESP-IDF as the framework. This version bump brings expanded microcontroller support."

That expansion comes in the form of support for the ESP32-P4, Espressif's highest-performance RISC-V microcontroller, plus the ESP32-H2 and ESP32-C6 — on top of existing support for the original Tensilica Xtensa LX6-based ESP32, the ESP32C3, ESP32-S2, and ESP32-S3. Unveiled by the company back in 2023, the ESP32-P4 includes two 32-bit RISC-V cores running at up 400MHz, 768kB of on-chip static RAM (SRAM) plus 8kB of tightly-coupled memory (TCM), a single 40MHZ RISC-V core as part of a low-power subsystem, and 50 programmable inputs and outputs, the highest of any model in the ESP32 range.

The new support does, however, come with a caveat: "The newly supported variants (ESP32-C6, ESP32-H2, ESP32-P4) are still being refined," the ESPHome maintainers admit. "Some components may not yet be fully compatible with these chips. Additional component updates are planned for ESPHome 2025.7.0. They also currently only support using the ESP-IDF framework, and do not work with the Arduino framework in this release."

Another major change in the new release is the introduction of "basic" OpenThread support for ESP-IDF-based configurations. "This exciting addition enables ESP32-C6 and ESP32-H2 devices to join Thread networks," the project maintainers explain, "expanding your connectivity options beyond traditional Wi-Fi and Ethernet." Other tweaks include improved ESP-IDF compatibility for Bosch BME68x sensors, memory and flash storage footprint reductions, and improved performance — though the new release will also be the last to support ESP-IDF 4.x, and comes with the dependency of Python 3.10 or higher ahead of Python 3.9's end-of-life in October this year.

More information is available on the ESPHome website; the project's source code is available on GitHub under the ESPHome License, which applies the permissive MIT and reciprocal GNU General Public License 3 depending on whether you're looking at the C++ and runtime codebase or the Python and other codebase.