/esp-idf

Espressif IoT Development Framework. Official development framework for ESP32.

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Espressif IoT Development Framework

ESP-IDF is the official development framework for the ESP32 and ESP32-S Series SoCs provided for Windows, Linux and macOS.

Developing With ESP-IDF

Setting Up ESP-IDF

See setup guides for detailed instructions to set up the ESP-IDF:

Chip Getting Started Guides for ESP-IDF
ESP32
ESP32-S2
ESP32-C3

Note: Each ESP-IDF release has its own documentation. Please see Section Versions how to find documentation and how to checkout specific release of ESP-IDF.

Non-GitHub forks

ESP-IDF uses relative locations as its submodules URLs (.gitmodules). So they link to GitHub. If ESP-IDF is forked to a Git repository which is not on GitHub, you will need to run the script tools/set-submodules-to-github.sh after git clone. The script sets absolute URLs for all submodules, allowing git submodule update --init --recursive to complete. If cloning ESP-IDF from GitHub, this step is not needed.

Finding a Project

As well as the esp-idf-template project mentioned in Getting Started, ESP-IDF comes with some example projects in the examples directory.

Once you've found the project you want to work with, change to its directory and you can configure and build it.

To start your own project based on an example, copy the example project directory outside of the ESP-IDF directory.

Quick Reference

See the Getting Started guide links above for a detailed setup guide. This is a quick reference for common commands when working with ESP-IDF projects:

Setup Build Environment

(See the Getting Started guide listed above for a full list of required steps with more details.)

  • Install host build dependencies mentioned in the Getting Started guide.
  • Run the install script to set up the build environment. The options include install.bat or install.ps1 for Windows, and install.sh or install.fish for Unix shells.
  • Run the export script on Windows (export.bat) or source it on Unix (source export.sh) in every shell environment before using ESP-IDF.

Configuring the Project

  • idf.py set-target <chip_name> sets the target of the project to <chip_name>. Run idf.py set-target without any arguments to see a list of supported targets.
  • idf.py menuconfig opens a text-based configuration menu where you can configure the project.

Compiling the Project

idf.py build

... will compile app, bootloader and generate a partition table based on the config.

Flashing the Project

When the build finishes, it will print a command line to use esptool.py to flash the chip. However you can also do this automatically by running:

idf.py -p PORT flash

Replace PORT with the name of your serial port (like COM3 on Windows, /dev/ttyUSB0 on Linux, or /dev/cu.usbserial-X on MacOS. If the -p option is left out, idf.py flash will try to flash the first available serial port.

This will flash the entire project (app, bootloader and partition table) to a new chip. The settings for serial port flashing can be configured with idf.py menuconfig.

You don't need to run idf.py build before running idf.py flash, idf.py flash will automatically rebuild anything which needs it.

Viewing Serial Output

The idf.py monitor target uses the idf_monitor tool to display serial output from ESP32 or ESP32-S Series SoCs. idf_monitor also has a range of features to decode crash output and interact with the device. Check the documentation page for details.

Exit the monitor by typing Ctrl-].

To build, flash and monitor output in one pass, you can run:

idf.py flash monitor

Compiling & Flashing Only the App

After the initial flash, you may just want to build and flash just your app, not the bootloader and partition table:

  • idf.py app - build just the app.
  • idf.py app-flash - flash just the app.

idf.py app-flash will automatically rebuild the app if any source files have changed.

(In normal development there's no downside to reflashing the bootloader and partition table each time, if they haven't changed.)

Erasing Flash

The idf.py flash target does not erase the entire flash contents. However it is sometimes useful to set the device back to a totally erased state, particularly when making partition table changes or OTA app updates. To erase the entire flash, run idf.py erase_flash.

This can be combined with other targets, ie idf.py -p PORT erase_flash flash will erase everything and then re-flash the new app, bootloader and partition table.

Resources