On June 4th, developers in Palo Alto, California, had the chance to attend a half-day workshop which focused on how IoT solutions can be developed, using Amazon FreeRTOS and ESP32-based development boards. The day started with a presentation of the history and future directions of Espressif’s IoT products, followed by an overview of the AWS IoT services, along with Amazon FreeRTOS for the ESP32 SoC.

Then, after distributing the necessary hardware to all attendees, the main part of this hands-on and self-paced workshop began, with mentors being available for guidance and help whenever this was necessary to any of the workshop attendees. This way, embedded developers were able to test appliance functionality during the class and build a whole project back home. In general, they learned about the AWS IoT suite of services and built firmware for the management of typical IoT appliances.

The collaboration between Espressif and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has gone from strength to strength since AWS re:Invent 2016. Indeed, the runaway success of ESP32, since its launch in September 2016, and the adoption of the FreeRTOS kernel by AWS have paved the way for a closer collaboration between Espressif and AWS. The two companies have worked together, bringing such Amazon-qualified development boards as ESP32-DevKitC and ESP-WROVER-KIT-VB to the market, and making the secure connection of ESP32 to AWS IoT even easier.