Espressif ESP32 Tutorial — Part 1

Getting Started.

I’ve just started using the ESP32 for my IoT projects and I wanted to record the experience. So here we are! The ESP32 makes for a great low power IoT sensor hub and is a more capable alternative to the Arduino. The caveat is that there is a bit more mucking around to get it to work. There is also some complexity in getting a dual-core microcontroller to play along with a real-time operating system.

I purchased my board from Jaycar in Australia, I’m sure you can get cheaper versions ordering direct from China.

The toolchain for programming the ESP32 in C is a bit of a pain. You’ll need Espressif’s software library (esp-idf), a cross-compiler and build tools that are specific to the chip (xtensa-esp32-*), and a utility to flash the resulting binary file to the device. There are a few different options to program the ESP32, including:

1. ESP-IDF — the official IoT development framework for ESP32.
2. Arduino IDE — requires an add on.
3. Microsoft Visual Studio Code
4. Eclipse
5. EmbedXcode

In the next post I’ll try a few of these to see if any offer advantages over the others.