Getting Started with ESP32

In this post we will see how to run a hello world program using ESP 32. ESP 32 is new chip from Espressif , the same company behind ESP8266. Espressif  released a nice ESP-WROOM-32 which has ESP32-D0WDQ6 inside along with required FLASH memory and antenna.

Many boards are available in the market in the same form factor as that of NodeMCU. Most of these boards are based on ESP-WROOM-32.

Important features of the ESP 32

• Single or Dual core Tensilica Xtensa 32-bit LX6 microprocessor (ESP-WROOM-32 has dual core processor)
• WiFi
• Bluetooth (BLE 4.2 & BR/BDR)
• 512KB of SRAM
• supports upto 16MB of Flash (ESP-WROOM-32 comes with 4MB of  FLASH)
• Clock is adjustable from 80MHZ to 240MHZ
• Operating voltage 2.3 V ~ 3.6 V

for latest new on ESP 32, you can check out esp32.net

This what i got on serial console when first time i powered the device

The factory app running on the device puts it in the AP mode

ESP 32 DevKit PinOut

If you are using Arduino IDE to program ESP32, you can refer the IOs with their number(IOx).For example to make IO4 HIGH,you can write digitalWrite(4,HIGH). On ESP WROOM 32,the SDIO Slave interface is already connected to integrated SPI Flash, so you can’t use the following pins

SCK/CLK/SD_CLK/GPIO6
CMD/SCS/SD_CMD/GPIO11
SDO/SD0/SD_DATA0/GPIO7
SDI/SD1/SD_DATA1/GPIO8
SHD/SD2/SD_DATA2/GPIO9
SWP/SD3/SD_DATA3/GPIO10

In case of ESP-WROVER module, the external RAM uses GPIO 16 and GPIO17 for CE and SCLK respectively.

Setting up ESP – IDF For ESP32 :

To develope apps with ESP IDF, we need get the toolchain first, you can download preconfigured MSYS2 from here . Extract the zip to C drive

run mingw32.exe 

now we can clone the IDF git repo (you can ignore any errors that are printed on console)

git clone --recursive https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf.git

export IDF_PATH=~/esp-idf

once the command completes, IDF will be available in esp-idf folder

Running Hello-World Program on ESP32

ESP-IDF comes with lot of examples, let load hello world program , navigate to hello_world project present in examples folder

run the following commands

make

make flash

make monitor

make flash will load the code to ESP board, and monitor will open up the console and prints all serial messages

If it is the first time you are running make command it will open up menu config, you only need to change the COM port. (this option is present in serial flasher config) , save and exit…you can fire this menu manually using make menuconfig

You can see in the following screen shot output of make monitor command

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ESP32 related blogs:

next we will see how to setup development environment and load code from arduino IDE – Setting up arduino to program ESP 32

You can also use eclipse for development – ESP IDF : Setting up eclipse for ESP 32

Write/Read data from SD card – Arduino: Interfacing SD card with ESP32

FreeRTOS tasks – ESP32 : Creating task using FreeRTOS 

Queues – ESP32 : Inter task communication using FreeRTOS Queues

Connecting to WiFi – ESP32 : Connecting to WiFi network

Event Groups – ESP32: Task Synchronization – FreeRTOS Event Groups

Using Timers in ESP 32 – ESP-IDF : Using timers in ESP32

ESP32 TCP sockets – ESP-IDF: ESP32 as TCP Client

Running TCP Server – ESP-IDF: TCP Server on ESP32

Controlling Servo – ESP-IDF : Lets Control Servo Using ESP32

Control servo from network – Control Servo from remote location 

Control servo from android phone – Controlling ESP32 connected appliances

HttpWebServer Using MicroPython – How to make ESP32 as HTTP webserver using MicroPython 

ESP32 based Serial to MQTT bridge – Arduino: MQTT to Serial Bridge Using ESP32

MQTT based remote LED On/Off Control – Arduino: ESP32 Home automation (Simple On/Off control using MQTT)

Interfacing Arduino UNO with ESP32 – Arduino: Interfacing Arduino UNO with ESP32

How to use external RAM present in WROVER – ESP-IDF : Using External RAM present in ESP32 WROVER module

End to end IoT use case – ESP32 Based On/Off Boiler Controller