Two HT-HC33 boards communicating over HaLow without a gateway — is AP mode possible?

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Hi, I’m trying to get two HT-HC33 boards (ESP32-S3 + MM6108) communicating directly over HaLow without a gateway using mm-iot-esp32 v2.10.4 with ESP-IDF v5.1.4.

The MM6108A1 chip initializes correctly, firmware 1.17.6 loads, and mmwlan_ap_enable() returns success with the message “AP Mode started successfully”. However, a HaLow scan from the second HC-33 finds 0 networks — the AP is not actually beaconing.

I believe the issue is a linker conflict: ESP32-S3’s built-in esp_wifi and esp_phy components pull in wpa_supplicant which has duplicate symbols with Morse Micro’s hostap library. Without --allow-multiple-definition the build fails. With it, the build succeeds but the radio doesn’t transmit.

Has anyone successfully built and run the ap_mode example on an ESP32-S3 board with ESP-IDF v5.1.4? How do you handle the wpa_supplicant/hostap symbol conflicts?

Thanks