Espressif-IDE confusion and installation issues

sstandfast · Postby **sstandfast** » Thu Feb 08, 2024 9:06 am

Hello,

First off, I'd like to say that my background is primarily hardware, although I do have a bit of experience using PICMicros from Microchip. That said, I received an ESP32 board from 'Santa' this past Christmas and I thought I'd finally give it a go and see if I can get it running. I thought I'd come here and provide a few thoughts and feedback on the setup and installation process from the perspective of someone who doesn't eat, sleep, and breath compilers, toolchains, and environment variables. I am also seeking advice on some issues I'm having with using the Espressif-IDE that I will cover as well. I apologize in advance, this will likely be a longer post; thank you to those who put up with my ramblings and stick it out to the end.

Installation Process
The installation process was very straightforward and dare I say painless. I googled ESP32 IDE and one of the first hits was the Get Started page located here https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp ... t-started/ I followed the link for installing the Eclipse plugin because MPLAB X is based on Eclipse so I'm vaguely familiar with the IDE. That took me to a GitHub page https://github.com/espressif/idf-eclips ... /README.md that immediately recommended to install the "Espressif-IDE instead of the Eclipse CDT + IEP Plugin update approach to avoid the hassles of updating". A link was provided to the download page for the installer as well as this instruction page. https://github.com/espressif/idf-eclips ... staller.md. So far, so good. The installer downloaded and then walked through the installation process without issue. So 5-stars for the simple install process.

Next, according to the installer page, it was time to launch the IDE and verify my build environment. This is where I had my first issue. On my Build Environment page, I only had two variables listed compared to the eight shown in the instructions page. Attempting to create a new Espressif IDF Project resulted in an error window popping up complaining of missing tools. The offline Windows Installer page claims that "Espressif-IDE Installer (All-in-One) is an offline installer and it comes with all the required components to work with the ESP-IDF Application development." I learned that this isn't exactly true; in order to get the program to move forward I first had to install Git and add the path to git-cmd.exe to the "install tools" utility. This utility then ran in the background and installed whatever tools were missing. After that my Build Environment page had ten entries on it so I must be doing better than the tutorial at this point. I was also able to continue with creating a new Espressif IDF Project after that.

I was able to discover the missing Git tool by going back to the Eclipse Plugin install page and continuing to read beyond the link I followed down to the Prerequisites section. I would recommend either updating the All-In-One instructions page to either indicate that Git needs to be installed first or include Git in the All-In-One so others can avoid this issue.

Creating and Building My First Project
Continuing to follow the instructions, I am presented with a link https://github.com/espressif/idf-eclips ... ew-projectto the next section to create a project. I create the following project:

: Project Creation.png (66.19 KiB) Viewed 8201 times

The project looks like this when created:

: Simple Project.png (87.22 KiB) Viewed 8201 times

I verified that the "Launch Mode", "Launch Config", and "Launch Target" all match (even selected the correct COM port for my ESP32 board in the Launch Target settings) and then clicked the hammer icon to build the project. This is where I ran into my second issue. The build failed with the following printed to the console:

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