Liberating Bluetooth on the Esp32
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The ESP32's Bluetooth capabilities just got a whole lot more exciting, thanks to a recent talk that's sparking lively discussions about the merits of video content versus text summaries. While some commenters are grumbling about the 30-minute video format, others are pointing out that it's par for the course for conference talks, citing examples from CppCon and RustConf. Meanwhile, a few enterprising individuals are sharing alternative links to the talk, including a YouTube upload and the official recording on media.ccc.de. As one commenter astutely observed, text is often preferable to video, leaving the question: can we get the CliffsNotes version without watching the whole thing?
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Dec 27, 2025 at 5:37 PM EST
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https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-liberating-bluetooth-on-the-esp3...
you can see similar videos on CppCon, PyData, RustConf, DefCon and others
no, it's you are under some impression you imagined that came from misreading what I wrote
I'm saying "if something is popular, one would expect everything to be scrutinized already, just due to popularity".
"binary blob in the middle of open source" is doubly intriguing target that's weird that it took so long to attract attention
First you have to limit yourself to a specific radio variant, because the actual radio hardware is different on different esp32 variants.
Then you have a massive amount of things this "blobs" actually contain.
And last there is also a lot of continues movement integrating newer radio features. E.g newer BLE version standard implementation and so forth. So you play catch with actual new development.
This. The FCC is a bunch of morons...
ESP-IDF is a bright stars when it comes to opensource HALs in the microcontroller world.
From personal experience, I've got dozens of esp32 devices around my house and they all work great.
You really don't want to know just how bad Windows' Bluetooth stack is. It doesn't even implement basic features. I would hesitate to call it a compliant implementation at all. Oh, the API call for all BT features exist, but they either do nothing, return garbage and lies, or are just broken.
If you use a well supported BT adapter under the right Linux distro, it's flawless.
If anything is to blame it is the Bluetooth protocol and the fact that it is apparently hard to implement correctly.
You're deflecting blame for your shitty decisions onto a racist strawman.
Buy a good Bluetooth adapter which is actively supported by the Linux kernel. Do 20 minutes of research instead of buying the cheapest thing you can and then spouting racist bullshit to post-hoc justify yourself.
If you take a few moments to think about what you're doing, you can get Bluetooth working flawlessly by simply buying the correct adapter. And you don't have to be a racist xenophobe about it.
However Bluetooth on Linux is indeed currently irritatingly borked when it does decide to not work.
It is cool but also, i wonder if Espressif screwed up by putting blobs under apache license.. seems like a legal mistake.