ESP32 Forum

Hi Espressif friends -

I recently got introduced to an ESP32 board and got started working on it. I had a couple of issues that slowed down my ramp up, so I thought I'd share it so you might be able to improve the experience for future newbies.

Getting Started guide
Your getting started guide was quite good. Overall the documentation is great. Kudos to you for that. However, after getting to the last step of monitoring the "Hello World" app, I needed help knowing how to set up my own project. The most useful next link for me would have been the Build System page, but it is buried under another section and not easy to find among all the other topics. I would also suggest continuing the getting started with instructions on how to create a new project based on a template.

Stable versus Latest
For someone not very familiar with ESP development, one can easily get lost between stable and latest documentation. The site looks almost identical except for the subtitle in the upper left. Consider finding a way to make that more obvious, perhaps by changing the site color, adding a warning header that one is looking at latest, or something else.

It would also be nice if the subtitle that says "latest" or "stable" acted as a switcher between the two.

What I found was that when searching for solutions from a search engine, one is equally likely to get links from either version, and easily not notice that you are now following the wrong instructions. A colleague ended up with a hybrid dev environment as a result.

Forums
When I first needed help, I went to post an issue on your forum. My experience was quite poor for a few reasons.

First, when I submitted my first post, it disappeared on me on refresh with no explanation. When I looked at my profile, the post didn't show up either. My initial reaction was that I hit a bug or messed up. I ended up finding a post by someone else that explained the issue, that it appears to be a spam-fighting measure. The problem is that the post appeared to have disappeared for even me, and there was no explanation of why. Also, before my profile was white listed, I couldn't even reach out to an admin (the link to message one is just missing which makes the UI look broken). What's more, my replies to my own now-approved post are also withheld for approval - one would think replies to my own approved post should automatically show up. Overall, this is a very jarring and off-putting experience for a new customer.

Finally, I submitted a post to troubleshoot my latest esp-idf environment on Windows. I have a blocking problem building. One admin responded once, but has not responded since despite having provided more information.

Regards,
David

I agree with most of what you mentioned. I personally never had a issue with the forum though.
I will say that even over the last year the write-ups have gotten much better. Still could use tweaking. IMO the problem with it is that the people who wrote it are to close to it. Many smart people are awesome at creating things, but are not so good when it comes to writing non technical instructions. They need to write it while keeping in mind that this is the first time someone is looking at it, and with probably little to no knowledge of how to set it up.

FWIW, the simplest and fastest way to get up and running the quickest is to give platformio.org a try.
What's nice about this solution is that it allows you to code in Arduino or IDF.
The only downside (at the time of this post) is that it lacks the ability to easily change settings in menuconfig.

What I have done is a combination of both. I use their write up to install it and use Visual Studio Code with some changes to have the best of both worlds. I have icons to do quick things and even a icon for menuconfig. Espressif, should invest a tiny bit of time into making a one file install that can do all of this, like many of us have.

V4 was vastly easier for me to follow over v3. I still ran into some issues, however they were relatively easily overcome.