ESP Flash Download Tool (Windows) fixes / features
Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2022 12:44 pm
The current version (v3.9.2) of (windows) flash download tool has taken several steps in a good direction for 'ease of use' in our production environment, but there are several annoyances that could be easily addressed:
- On starting the tool, the user is _still_ presented with a dialog box to choose the 'chip type', 'work mode' and 'load mode'. In our case, this is ALWAYS: 'ESP32', 'develop' and 'uart'. Some way to bypass this screen by pre-specifying these, or (at least) specify these defaults so you just click 'OK' would be great. Possibly via command line options (which could be added to a windows shortcut), or another settings file would work fine. Providing ability to work with any/all espressif parts may be useful for espressif developers, but I'd wager very few developers 'in the wild' use more than one part.
- Provide a way to specify (ideally, a command line option) path to a configuration to be used would be very helpful. At the moment, I'm using two separate copies of the flash programming tool (in separate directories) to provide two configurations. I saw somewhere that there was an environment variable that can be used to specify a path to the configuration. Does this still work? IF this still works, it is still more convoluted to setup (create a batch file to set the environment variable, then run the exe, etc.)
- In my opinion, the 'process status' button (start/stop/finish/fail, etc.) should be some neutral color for 'in progress' steps (i.e., 'sync/download', etc.), and only turn GREEN on success, or (as is currently does) yellow/red on fail/fault/'forced stop', etc.
- The documentation has not been updated to reflect changes to the UI in v3.9.2.
- Is there any possibility of releasing the source for these tools on github? I'm sure that would spark more discussion / improvements.
- On starting the tool, the user is _still_ presented with a dialog box to choose the 'chip type', 'work mode' and 'load mode'. In our case, this is ALWAYS: 'ESP32', 'develop' and 'uart'. Some way to bypass this screen by pre-specifying these, or (at least) specify these defaults so you just click 'OK' would be great. Possibly via command line options (which could be added to a windows shortcut), or another settings file would work fine. Providing ability to work with any/all espressif parts may be useful for espressif developers, but I'd wager very few developers 'in the wild' use more than one part.
- Provide a way to specify (ideally, a command line option) path to a configuration to be used would be very helpful. At the moment, I'm using two separate copies of the flash programming tool (in separate directories) to provide two configurations. I saw somewhere that there was an environment variable that can be used to specify a path to the configuration. Does this still work? IF this still works, it is still more convoluted to setup (create a batch file to set the environment variable, then run the exe, etc.)
- In my opinion, the 'process status' button (start/stop/finish/fail, etc.) should be some neutral color for 'in progress' steps (i.e., 'sync/download', etc.), and only turn GREEN on success, or (as is currently does) yellow/red on fail/fault/'forced stop', etc.
- The documentation has not been updated to reflect changes to the UI in v3.9.2.
- Is there any possibility of releasing the source for these tools on github? I'm sure that would spark more discussion / improvements.