ESP32 Forum

Late last month I went through the , IMHO, crazy setup of the ESP32 into the Arduino IDE. This morning I updated using the same system. Maybe I am naive and old fashion but I understood that the whole basis of the Arduino environment was to provide a low tech high level entry into the AVR world. This seems to be negated by the new Espressif designers, The options to set up the Git Gui are mind boggling I am sure well suited for computer nerds, but leave this user cold. What happened to a zio file library? Over a 40 year work history much on the peripherals of software I have seen the gradual decline in the ascertaining of what is really needed by users and the increase of complexity because software designers 'can'; there are few limits to unwanted creativity with the processing power available.

It would seem to me that the concepts used in the 'risc' computers ( Do well on the 10% of functions that are used 90% of the time) are slowly being lost with this product application to the Arduino IDE framework..
I would welcome comments on this, and for those more technically minded than me some guidance to the designers if you are in agreement to the general principles, or explanation to me as to why it has to be so complicated...

The update instructions are only 4 steps long. "Too many buttons!", really? Maybe you would like platformio?

True
But I would suggest that you go through git.exe on a clean installation and look at it from a 'normal arduino' users perspective..

Hi rod,

You're totally right that installing ESP32 Arduino support is currently much more involved than most Arduino platform support installs. It's been like this (more or less) since the very early days of ESP32 when our Arduino users were "early adopters".

We actually have a developer working on the ESP32 Arduino packaging right now. We're expecting to offer an easier install experience in the future. (No specific ETA right now, to my knowledge. But soon.)

Angus

rodmcm wrote:Late last month I went through the , IMHO, crazy setup of the ESP32 into the Arduino IDE. This morning I updated using the same system. Maybe I am naive and old fashion but I understood that the whole basis of the Arduino environment was to provide a low tech high level entry into the AVR world.

I agree.
Not because the entry level for ESP32 should be low (for entry level there is AVR) but because one should not make things (much) more complicated than necessary and use and support standard features and standard tools where possible.

Starting from version 1.6.4 the Boards Manager of the Arduino IDE can be used to automatically install support for 3rd party hardware by simply entering an URL in the File > Preferences dialog.
https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/wiki ... cification

This was introduced with the Arduino IDE 1.6.4 more than two years ago. It really is a shame that Espressif is still not supporting it for the popular ESP32.

With Boards Manager support:
New install: In Arduino IDE add URL in preferences. In Boards Manager select ESP32, install and you're done.
For upgrade: Automatic IDE notification 'There is a new board version', open Boards Manager, select upgrade and you're done.

I have seen several cases where people had major problems (they actually did not understand why because things/boards worked with others) because they had an older/outdated manually installed arduino-esp32 core and were not aware that it was not up to date and that this was the cause of their problems.

rodmcm wrote:... I understood that the whole basis of the Arduino environment was to provide a low tech high level entry into the AVR world. This seems to be negated by the new Espressif designers, ...

Once upon a time, "low tech entry..." and "AVR" were appropriate for Arduino. Then because the Arduino GUI team and the "separate" hardware company did not see eye-to-eye, other hardware developers took advantage of the Arduino GUI "easy" nature and introduced additional hardware models, some clones but some unique. Eventually the Arduino team made peace with the hardware team, but by then the Arduino GUI was being used (or misused) by many entities.

I've always said that if one wants to play within the Arduino GUI but they desire official support, they should buy hardware from Arduino or their partners, such as Adafruit. You will be supported, but you pre-pay for that privilege.

Arduino + ESP32 (or ESP8266) are relatively easy to install. Because of the different OS environment that the Arduino GUI supports, often the ESP side of things seem convoluted ... and they are, somewhat. But, that is the price one pays for playing on the sharp edge of microcontrollers. When the ESP8266 Arduino library was written, it was more of a "personal project" but the ESP32 Arduino core is an Espressif implementation, even if the same authors are involved. IMHO, the ESP8266 is still a darn-good workhorse, but we all know that the ESP32 is significantly advanced, technically. This simply makes the Arduino core implementation more complex.

I have Arduino + ESP8266 & Arduino + ESP32 running on multiple hardware, Windows 10 Prof, Linux Mint 18.3 and there is no serious implementation issues with the generic environment. I am personally amazed that Espressif even sponsored the Arduino ESP32 project - it is a distraction for them and while it may increase their sell of silicon, it certainly is a distraction from the professional IDF environment. One will never get the efficiency and stability of the IDF under the Arduino core wrappers... it just will never happen. Arduino is great for prototyping or doing personal projects and even proof-of-concepts, but it is not (and never will be) a professional GUI development environment.

Ray

To be fair there, the way Arduino support is implemented for the ESP32 makes it pretty easy to migrate to the 'full' ESP-IDF environment if you so please: the entirety of ESP-IDF is callable from the Arduino side and it's possible to import the Arduino component into esp-idf and essentially make an esp-idf-with-arduino-bits project.