Advanced

This document is intended to help users set up the software environment of applications using Espressif ESP32. Through a simple step-by-step process to illustrate how to use ESP-IDF(Espressif IoT Development Framework).

What You Need

To develop applications for ESP32 you need:

• PC loaded with either Windows, Linux or Mac operating system
• Toolchain to build the Application for ESP32
• ESP-IDF that essentially contains API for ESP32 and scripts to operate the Toolchain
• A text editor to write programs (Projects) in C

Preparation for development

Setting up the toolchain

Windows doesn’t have a built-in “make” environment, so as well as installing the toolchain you will need a GNU-compatible environment. We can use the MSYS2 environment to provide this environment. Toolchain Setup The quick setup is to download the Windows all-in-one toolchain & MSYS2 zip file from dl.espressif.com: https://dl.espressif.com/dl/esp32_win32_msys2_environment_and_toolchain-20180110.zip.

Procedures:

1. Open msys32 mingw32.exe terminal window.
2. Create new directory

   mkdir -p /home
   

3. The newly created directory can be moved by typing cd ~/esp

   cd /home
   

   Getting ESP-IDF

Besides the toolchain (that contains programs to compile and build the application), you also need ESP32 specific API / libraries. They are provided by Espressif in ESP-IDF repository. To get it, open terminal, navigate to the directory you want to put ESP-IDF, and clone it using git clone command: To get all the sub-modules run another command

cd /home/esp-idf
git submodule update --init

Setup path to ESP-IDF – toolchain program access ESP-IDF using IDF_PATH.Remember to replace back-slashes with forward-slashes in the original Windows path.

printenv IDF_PATH

To setup the software environment and get esp-idf follow the instructions given in the link below.

https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/get-started/index.html#

For further information/queries connect with us at sales@protocentral.com.