ESPHome devices built on Beken BK7231N and BK7231T chips, common in cheap Tuya plugs and switches, get a new toolchain in ESPHome 2026.11. Pull request #21531 by J. Nick Koston (bdraco), merged into the development branch on 26 October 2026, bumps LibreTiny to 1.14.0, released on 22 October, and builds both chips with version 3.0.78 of Beken's SDK (BDK) instead of 3.0.33. The pull request carries a breaking-change label, because one board's pin mapping changes.

Fixes that come with the new SDK

The pull request lists three open ESPHome issues that the update closes:

  • #19430: on a device running station and access point at the same time, the two network interfaces could get mixed up, so Wi-Fi credentials entered in the captive portal did not connect until the device was power cycled.
  • #19429: an OTA update through the web server tripped the watchdog on BK7231T.
  • #18268: a device without Wi-Fi could end up in a reboot loop.

power_save_mode works again together with bk72xx_ble. In LibreTiny 1.14.0, WiFi.setSleep only arms DTIM sleep (LibreTiny changes #414 and #417), so the setting is applied instead of being skipped when Bluetooth is in use. bk72xx_ble now refuses to build with a framework older than 1.14.0 or a BDK older than 3.0.78.

ADC readings on BK7231N and BK7231T are now in correct millivolts. Before LibreTiny change #416 they showed roughly half of the real voltage, so a multiply filter added to make up for that is worth checking after the update.

More flash, less RAM

The new SDK brings WPA3 (SAE) support and the mbedtls library with it, and that costs flash. In the pull request's measurements a BK7231N firmware grows from 551,162 to 626,380 bytes of flash (about 75 KB more) and free RAM drops from 46,220 to 35,324 bytes. On BK7231T flash goes from 583,440 to 668,840 bytes (about 85 KB) and RAM from 61,488 to 49,376 bytes. Large configurations that were already close to the limit are worth checking before updating.

Breaking change for LN-CB3S V1.0

On the LN-CB3S V1.0 board, D12 now drives PA10 instead of PA11. The old pin is available as D13. Configurations that use D12 on this board need to be checked against the wiring.

Other changes

LibreTiny 1.14.0 also adds a generic RTL8710BX board with 1 MiB of flash and 468 KiB for the application. BK7238 remains blocked in ESPHome. According to the pull request, dozens of BK7231T and BK7231N devices had been running this combination in the field for a day before the merge.

On the same day ESPHome also merged #21586 by Korkuttum, a software I2C bus for BK72xx chips.