Push ESP32 Over The Air Updates From GitHub

Let’s say you’re working on an ESP32 project to send off to your grandma; something she can just plug in and it will start automatically monitoring her plant’s water levels. But you discover a critical flaw in the firmware and need to update it. Does she send it back? Do you walk her through dropping the update via the Arduino IDE OTA? The easiest way would be to plan and use something like esp_ghosta, an OTA framework by [Justin Hammond].

OTA (Over-The-Air) updates are a fantastic feature of the ESP32, and we’ve covered libraries that make it easy. But compared to those earlier projects, esp_ghosta takes a different approach. Rather than hosting a web server where someone can drop a binary, it looks at GitHub releases. [Justin] had to include a streaming JSON parser, as GitHub API responses tend to be beefy. The workflow is straightforward, push a new commit to your main branch on GitHub, and the action will trigger, building a few different versions. Your little plant watering reminder at your grandma’s will check every so often to see if a new version has been pushed and can update with rollback on littlefs, fatfs, and spiffs filesystems.

It’s an incredible project that we suspect will be very useful for many folks to update their projects. [Justin] even includes an example GitHub action and a sample ESP32 project.