Installing SDK and Toolchain for ESP8266 WiFi SoC

This short tutorial will guide you to install the toolchain (which includes the gcc compiler) for the ESP series of SoC, discuss the steps to write code using the ESP SDK and finally load the compiled code to the SoC and run it. These will be useful for you if you are developing IoT based applications. In this way you don’t need to attach external microcontroller to the ESP module to run your code, you can run code directly on the ESP which will make your application simple, small and low cost. But one drawback is that the application code you write resides on the external flash chip of the ESP modules and can be read by anyone using a flash programmer. Thus your code is not secure from duplication. So, let us first download and install the toolchain use the following link to download the toolchain https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp8266-rtos-sdk/en/latest/get-started/windows-setup.html ESP SDK download link download is a ZIP file which you need to extract to your harddisk say on C:\ drive. It will create a folder named msys32 msys32 folder This folder contains four executable file, you need to run the file mingw32.exe mingw32 You will get a console window like shown below msys32 console window Actually it is a Linux OS like shell (command) window. So you need some familiarity with Linux Shell commands to operate it. Now the first step is to create a directory (folder) for keeping the ESP SDK and ESP related programs we develop. For that I recommend creating a folder named ESP in root of some drive say F:\ drive or C:\. to goto new drive you have to type the cd command like this. CD stands for change directory. change directory command now we are in F:\ drive, enter a command to make new directory called the esp. In this directory(“esp”) we will keep the SDK and our own program files. The command is mkdir esp . mkdir stands for make directory. Then we have to go inside this newly created directory using the cd command. esp folder Now we have to clone the ESP SDK using the git command. enter following command in the schell git clone –recursive https://github.com/espressif/ESP8266_RTOS_SDK.git this will clone the SDK on your local harddisk git clone the ESP SDK An environment variable needed to be defined so that the toolchain program can find your SDK. The variable should be defined like this
    	
    		export IDF_PATH="/f/esp/ESP8266_RTOS_SDK"
    	
you can verify if the path has been correctly set by using the echo command
echo $IDF_PATH 
and it will print the environment variable value. $IDF_PATH environment variable After this, we need to check which version of Python is available in our MSYS environment. To do this, issue the following command …
python --version
and it will print the Python version, mostly you must be having Python 2.7 installed. Now some Python packages needed to be installed, all these are listed in a filled named requirements.txt we need to issue the following command to install all these packages in one go …
python2.7 -m pip install --user -r $IDF_PATH/requirements.txt
Now we are all set up to start a ESP8266 SDK project !

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Avinash

Avinash Gupta is solely focused on free and high quality tutorial to make learning embedded system fun !

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2 thoughts on “Installing SDK and Toolchain for ESP8266 WiFi SoC

  • By A M Morawala - Reply

    Hi Avinash. I am an old time user of AVR Extreme Burner. When I launched the application today, I was requested to make a donation to Extreme Electronics. I tried to do so, but since the currency was only in USD, my transaction was denied. How can I contribute to Extreme Electronics, since it is very useful to me? Please let me know on m y email ID.
    Regards.
    A M Morawala

  • By Sk - Reply

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