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A Third Shot of Espressif: Flashing an Espressif ESP01s with an arduino using CLion and PlatformIO

Written on August 18th, 2022 by Sean Webster

^{Picture: Gray tree frog}

I could have named this something different. I did not.

Setting up PlatformIO with Clion

PlatformIO has documentation here, but I will walk through it.

1. Open the CLion plugin menu using ctrl+shift+A and type plugins

1. Install the platformIO plugin, by searching for PlatformIO

Configuring PlatformIO with CLion

PlatformIO automatically downloads configurations for a project if it doesn’t already have them.

1. Create a new PlatformIO project: File->New->Project...

1. Select PlatformIO->Espressif->Espressif Generic ESP8266 ESP-01 1M->esp8266-rtos-sdk

Note: Make sure to check the onboard memory, and that it matches

The PlatformIO project should be configured

Setting up an existing project

1. PlatformIO is nice enough to supply us with examples at https://github.com/platformio/platform-espressif8266. Clone that baby wherever you want, and we can get started.

2. Open your blinky folder example folder in clion platform-espressif8266\examples\esp8266-rtos-sdk-blink and create a clion project out of it

1. The default blinky project is set up to blink gpio16. We don’t have that, and that’s not where our onboard LED is. So, we’re going to replace

void task_blink(void* ignore)
{
    gpio16_output_conf();
    while(true) {
    	gpio16_output_set(0);
        vTaskDelay(1000/portTICK_RATE_MS);
    	gpio16_output_set(1);
        vTaskDelay(1000/portTICK_RATE_MS);
    }

    vTaskDelete(NULL);
}

with

void task_blink(void* ignore)
{
	GPIO_ConfigTypeDef config = {.GPIO_Pin = GPIO_OUTPUT_IO_0, 
                             .GPIO_Mode = GPIO_Mode_Output, 
                             .GPIO_Pullup = GPIO_PullUp_DIS, 
                             .GPIO_IntrType = GPIO_PIN_INTR_DISABLE};
	gpio_config(&config);
	GPIO_OUTPUT_SET(GPIO_OUTPUT_IO_0, 0);

	while(true) {
		GPIO_OUTPUT_SET(GPIO_OUTPUT_IO_0, 0);
        vTaskDelay(1000/portTICK_RATE_MS);
		GPIO_OUTPUT_SET(GPIO_OUTPUT_IO_0, 1);
        vTaskDelay(1000/portTICK_RATE_MS);
    }

    vTaskDelete(NULL);
}

so our onboard LED will blink.

1. We’re also going to want to remove the build actions that Clion has attached to the PlatformIO actions. We want go to the action dropdown in the menu, and select Edit Configurations...

1. For each of both the Debug and Upload options, remove the build stage by selecting build and hit the - button.

Building and Flashing

1. Select the PlatformIO Upload build option, and hit the play button. If all goes as planned, your build should and your board should be flashed

Note: PlatformIO automatically detects upload port by default. You can configure a custom port using upload_port option in platformio.ini

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