// the find
blinker-iot/blinker-esp-idf
An IoT Solution,Blinker library for embedded hardware. Works with ESP8266, ESP32 (idf)
Blinker is an ESP-IDF component library that connects ESP8266/ESP32 devices to the Blinker IoT platform via MQTT and WebSocket, with a companion mobile app for control. It handles WiFi provisioning, time sync, button debounce, and OTA in a single drop-in component. Target audience is hobbyists and makers who want phone-controlled IoT devices without rolling their own MQTT stack.
Proper ESP-IDF component structure with CMakeLists and Kconfig — it slots into the standard IDF build system cleanly rather than fighting it. Maintains separate codebases for IDF v4.3 and v4.4, and for ESP8266 RTOS SDK, rather than trying to shim everything into one tree. Bundles a patched esp_http_server component for WebSocket support, which is a real gap in older IDF versions. Examples cover the common widget types (button, slider, joystick, RGB) with minimal boilerplate.
Pinned to IDF v4.3/v4.4 with no sign of ESP-IDF v5.x support — v5 has been stable for over two years and broke a lot of component APIs, so this library is already behind on every new ESP32 variant (ESP32-S3, ESP32-C6). Only 19 forks despite 4k stars is a bad ratio — it suggests the stars came from the Chinese maker community but almost nobody is extending it, which makes long-term maintenance a real question. The whole thing ties you to the Blinker cloud platform (auth key required upfront), so you cannot self-host or run offline; if their servers go down, your devices go dark. OTA support is still in the TODO list as of the last commit.