ESP32 support in CLion/IntelliJ Idea

[georgik]

CLion/IntelliJ Idea IDEs are used for embedded development. This post aims to gather insights about the current state of the tooling and how it could be improved in cooperation with JetBrains. Feel free to post your opinion or link to a GitHub issue related to development in those IDEs.

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[georgik]

Idea: Support for custom toolchains.

Build for ESP32, ESP32-S2, and ESP32-S3 requires a custom build of Rust toolchain with Xtensa support - https://github.com/esp-rs/rust-build

The espup deploys the toolchain under the name esp. Use can specify the toolchain name in the rust-toolchain.toml file: https://github.com/georgik/esp32-spooky-maze-game/blob/main/esp32-s3-box/rust-toolchain.toml

[toolchain]
channel = "esp"
components = ["rustfmt", "rustc-dev"]
targets = ["xtensa-esp32s3-none-elf"]

CLion with Rust plugin is able to pick the toolchain as default, but it does not provide an option to select/specify custom toolchain with the name esp, it provides only default, nightly and stable

One simple workaround is to add the toolchain to the Rust plugin like here: georgik/intellij-rust@4c95afd

Better option might be to add possibility to configure toolchain names.

[georgik]

Topic: Flashing

Tools: espflash 2.x

Run command espflash flash --release --monitor -p /dev/tty.usbmodem1101

Issue: Port must be explicitly specified, otherwise espflash keeps restarting, because it's not able to read users selection of the port.

[georgik]

Topic: ESP toolchain

Required path to xtensa gcc.

Workaround 1: source path before launching CLion

Workaround 2: hardcode PATH as PATH=$PATH:/Users/georgik/.espressif/tools/xtensa-esp32s3-elf/esp-2021r2-patch5-8_4_0/xtensa-esp32s3-elf/bin

[MathyV]

The full export from export-esp.sh is this:

export LIBCLANG_PATH="/home/mathy/.rustup/toolchains/esp/xtensa-esp32-elf-clang/esp-15.0.0-20221201/esp-clang/lib"
export PATH="/home/mathy/.rustup/toolchains/esp/xtensa-esp32s3-elf/esp-2021r2-patch5-8_4_0/xtensa-esp32s3-elf/bin:$PATH"
export PATH="/home/mathy/.rustup/toolchains/esp/riscv32-esp-elf/esp-2021r2-patch5-8_4_0/riscv32-esp-elf/bin:$PATH"

Not sure if they are all needed though.

[MathyV]

I did the same exercise on Windows using WSL. As it is harder here to set custom environment variables, in the end I had to resort to actually replacing the cargo binary with a wrapper script. If anyone is interested, this is the procedure:

• Open a WSL2 shell and move the original cargo binary.

$ cd .cargo/bin
$ mv cargo cargo.orig

• Next, create a new cargo file with the following content.

#!/bin/bash

source $HOME/export-esp.sh

exec $HOME/.cargo/bin/cargo.orig $@

• Finally, make sure the new cargo is executable

$ chmod 755 cargo

After that you should be able to build and flash the ESP32 build. Note that you need to have the ESP32 attached to the WSL first, there's plenty of documentation on how to do that and I suggest you first try it in CLI mode before attempting to configure CLion.

[georgik]

RISC-V toolchain is automatically detected from environment and it's marked as default.

Problem: User opens a new project for desktop target, it will automatically assume RISC-V and it will try to launch different GDB in case of debugging.

Workaround: Move the toolchain one level down and make System default.

[MathyV]

On-target debugging.

Problem: while it is possible to debug on an ESP32 using OpenOCD you need to:

• define a (unused?) toolchain as OpenOCD build configurations require it
• use the custom version of OpenOCD and GDB provided by Espressif.
• manually install them using install.sh for the correct esp-idf version as they are not installed by esp-idf-sys
• hardcode the paths in CLion
• reconfigure CLion whenever the tools are updated as the install paths contain the version number.

[MathyV]

In addition, if trying to debug on Windows using WSL, OpenOCD won't start from the WSL, stating it is an invalid Win32 Application.

Providing the WSL command in the OpenOCD location box instead doesn't help as it is probably interpreting it as one big path to a command.

[MathyV]

I created a ticket at JetBrains for the WSL case:
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/CPP-32484/Cant-use-OpenOCD-from-WSL