Week 9 Roundup

I’ve spent the last week setting up (fighting with) the GCC compiler and FreeRTOS SDK for the Wemos D1 mini development board (powered by the ESP8266 chipset).

I first tried to install the toolchain myself, which involves compiling a modified version of the GCC/binutils toolchain (xtensa-lx106-elf-gcc). This failed rather quickly – building the toolchain requires a case-sensitive filesystem, which I don’t have (macOS 10.12 uses HFS+), and is still apparently complicated with a non-gcc host compiler (I use clang/LLVM).

The workaround was to go through the Arduino IDE to obtain the toolchain’s binaries. After adding the ESP8266 repository to the IDE’s library manager (http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json) and installing the Arduino/ESP8266 support package, I just copied the compiler files to my own toolchains folder (~/toolchains/esp8266). I also installed esptool.py, a more stable replacement for the upload/flash tool that comes with the toolchain.

Installing the FreeRTOS SDK was harder. I was able to compile and upload some example projects from the Espressif-supplied SDK, but that was about it. Compiling anything relies on black-hole shell scripts and tens of recursive Makefiles. I could have tried to work with that, but I’d rather use a build system that I can at least partially understand, should anything fail.

The solution was to use ESP Open RTOS, a community-driven FreeRTOS SDK for the ESP. The build system is still more complicated than I’d like, and it’s nigh-impossible to compile with a Makefile built from scratch, but importing the SDK’s common.mk does the trick (and I can understand most of that Makefile, which means I should be able to debug problems that will inevitably arise).