ESP Board Overview

Introduction to ESP Board Overview

This page provides an overview of ESP boards from the esp8266 and esp32 cores used by the Arduino IDE and Arduino CLI, as well as esp32 schemes and partitions data.

The board overview page lists:

• The board name
• The board variant
• The built-in LED GPIO (if available)
• The microcontroller (MCU) used by the board
• The flash size of the board
• A link to the pins_arduino.h file for the board variant

It also provides filtering and sorting functionality.

The overview is generated from the boards.txt and pins_arduino.h files of the respective core and board variant.

ESP8266 Board Overview

The ESP8266 tab focuses on boards provided by the ESP8266 Arduino core. It helps you compare board variants and quickly identify practical details such as built-in LED GPIO, MCU family, available flash sizes, and links to the corresponding pins_arduino.h definitions.

Use this tab when you are selecting an ESP8266 board for a project, validating board-specific pin mappings, or checking whether a board variant matches your hardware setup.

ESP32 Board Overview

The ESP32 tab provides the same board-level overview for the ESP32 Arduino core, including board names, variants, LED information, MCU type, flash size, and variant header links.

In addition, the ESP32 tab is the starting point for partition-related navigation. For boards with available partition data, you can continue to the ESP32 partition overview to inspect partition layouts and compare scheme choices for OTA and file system usage.

ESP32 Partitions: Purpose of the Overview and Schemes

ESP32 Partitions

The ESP32 partitions overview shows how flash memory is split for a selected board. It makes it easy to see how much space is reserved for app images, OTA slots, file systems (for example SPIFFS/LittleFS), NVS, and other regions.

For a detailed description of partition types, see Espressif ESP32 Partition Table.

This overview is especially useful for questions like:

• Will my sketch fit into the app partition?
• Is OTA update possible with two app slots?
• How much memory is left for file systems and data?
• Which partition layout matches my board's flash size?

ESP32 Schemes

All schemes are based on CSV files in the ESP32 core under tools/partitions.

These CSV files are listed in ESP32 Partition Schemes and can be filtered and sorted by flash size, OTA support, SPIFFS support, and more.

Note: many schemes contain an otadata partition, but not all of them provide two app slots (ota_0 and ota_1). The OTA filter only shows schemes that contain otadata and at least two OTA app partitions.

Quick selection guide:

• If you need OTA updates, choose an OTA-capable scheme.
• If you store larger assets or logs, choose a scheme with a larger file system partition.
• If your firmware is large, choose a scheme with more app partition space.

Data Generation

If you are interested in how the overview data is generated, take a look at the repository esp-board-overview. It contains scripts and a Docker dev container to generate this Angular website.