Using ESP32 as a wifi+ble slave for raspberry pi compute module 3

[joeynoodles]

Hi, I would really appreciate any help with this topic - I am currently mightily stuck in the mud. My goal is to see if I can use the ESP32 as a wifi+ble slave to give my Raspberry Pi compute module 3 wifi and ble capabilities. I am currently able to communicate between the ESP32 and Raspberry Pi using UART, using the async_rxtxtasks example in the esp-idf, and a very simple read and write python serial module on the RPI side. The question is, how can I get my RPi to recognize the ESP as a wifi device and bluetooth controller, or is there a simpler way of doing it, like piping all instructions and receive raw data via UART? I have been reading a little bit of this ESP8266-RPi repo https://github.com/oshlab/esp8089/, and at the end, it was apparently capable of recognizing the esp8089 as a wifi device in the iwlist scan. Perhaps there is stuff in this repo I should try to apply to achieve my goal?

Thanks for reading, and much thanks in advance for any advice.

[kolban]

Howdy,
An apparent common practice for connecting an ESP32 as a co-processor for networking is to use the AT command processing. See the following:

https://github.com/espressif/esp32-at

and the video from the awesome pcbreflux:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBrEMIzm_uY

[WiFive]

Esp8689 is the slave version of esp32. I have not seen any esp8689 Linux host drivers but they may also work with esp32. There is an option to use hci over external uart for Bluetooth.

[joeynoodles]

Thank you very much for your replies! I have not found any esp32 drivers for RPi, so yeah that side is going to be too much work for me right now, but thank you though; from what I was reading with the esp8266 stuff, both from the code, and the kernel libraries from trying to update the software, it certainly piqued my interest, and I wouldn't mind trying that down the line for the esp32. But the ESP32-AT has been a success, at least in terms of using python-serial in RPi to tell the esp32 to connect to wifi. I am currently trying to use the ESP32-at commands to connect to a cloud via MQTT - I wonder if there's any shortcuts out there for this. Or is this even possible with just the CIPSTART/SEND commands? I'm very new to using clouds and MQTT/AMQP/HTTP communications, so, apologies if these are ridiculous questions, and if there are any hints or suggestions that would be greatly appreciated. Currently I'm reading some MQTT libraries for communicating to cloud, and it seems to be somewhat of a challenge.