Deploying Standalone ESP-IDF installation on visual studio code

When the esp32 came to market, the only way to program it was using the esp32 framework, which is relatively hard to get start with.

Nowdays new users have the option to program the esp32 using the arduino framework, which is very easy to start, but really quickly, as the projects become bigger they may need to move to something more stable.

This tutorial is for users that they want to get started with ESP-IDF, and they want to integrate it with visual studio code.

Lets get started.

Obtain idf tools from this website:

https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/get-started/index.html

And download the precompiled toolchain (the compiler). You can always compile the toolchain on your own, but this is a discussion for another post

Installer will ask to install python and git if they are not already installed.

After the installation is done, a folder with all the componenents will be installed under C:\users\<user-name>\desktop\esp-idf

Also a folder with the compilers will be installed under C:\users.espressif

Finally a customized terminal will appear on the desktop. Runing this shortcut will install automatically the environment variables, and you can install that terminal to compile and flash the application.

Lets build an example before integrating visual studio.

Go to esp-idf folder and copy blink folder from

\examples\get-started\blink

to the desktop.

Run the customized terminal. It will configure all the environment variables.

Navigate to the folder than we just copied, and type

idf.py build

which will build the project. After the progress finishes, it will say that it generated a bin file, and it will display, a very long command that we can be use to flash to the esp

To Be continued