ESP32 Partition Table @ 0xe000

[ankgt11]

I have been experimenting with various partition tables on my 4MB ESP32-WROOM-32 device, and had some confusion. I am using PlatformIO for development.

My original partition table looked like this:
[Codebox]
# Name, Type, SubType, Offset, Size, Flags
nvs, data, nvs, 0x9000, 0x5000,
otadata, data, ota, 0xe000, 0x2000,
app0, app, ota_0, 0x10000, 0x1C0000,
app1, app, ota_1, 0x1D0000,0x1C0000,
eeprom, data, 0x99, 0x390000,0x1000,
spiffs, data, spiffs, 0x391000,0x6F000,
[/Codebox]

For this when I study the esptool command generated by PlatformIO it looks correct and the flashing is happening at the following locations:

[Codebox]
0x1000 bootloader_dio_40m.bin
0x8000 partitions.bin
0xe000 boot_app0.bin
0x10000 firmware.bin
[/Codebox]

However, when I try the default factory partition like this:

[Codebox]
# Espressif ESP32 Partition Table
# Name, Type, SubType, Offset, Size
nvs, data, nvs, 0x9000, 0x6000
phy_init, data, phy, 0xf000, 0x1000
factory, app, factory, 0x10000, 1M
[/Codebox]

The esptool command is still the same. The part I dont understand is that why is it still uploading "boot_app0.bin" @ offset 0xe000? Now my nvs partition should be occupying this space.

Can somebody please help me understand? Is this is an error or normal behaviour?

Thanks!
AnkGT

[ESP_igrr]

Are you sure that sdkconfig file is pointing to the partition table file which you are modifying, and not some other one?
If you run "make V=1" (or idf.py -v build, if using CMake build system), you should get all the compilation commands printed out. This should include the call to the partition generation tool. Check if the command has the correct CSV file in it.

[ankgt11]

Thanks for the reply.

I am using PlatformIO which has its own build system, but yes I am sure it is using the correct partitions.cav file.

To check this, I added both BLE and Wifi to my applications which took the size of my app to about 1.8M. This failed to flash due to lack of space. But updating the partition table (factory app) to 2M solves the problem, which would not be the case if it was using some other csv file.

Am I correct in understanding that the program should not be flashing anything to 0xe000 when using the second partitions.csv example I have shown (non-ota one), and that only 3 bin files should be flashed in this case?

Thanks.

[ESP_igrr]

Yes, your understanding is correct, sorry i've missed the fact you are using platformio.

[ankgt11]

Thanks. In that case I guess I will take it up in the PlatformIO forums.

[chegewara]

boot_app0.bin have to be some special partition in platformIO, because like you said, it is created with standard partition file. In esp-idf all you need are 3 partitions that are build during compilation:
- bootloader,
- partition_table,
- application

and additional partitions like:
- nvs,
- ota_data (optional)
- phy_init (optional)