Development Environment

The official docs provides more comprehensive setup instructions. However, I will quickly cover the essential tools and setup needed for our exercises. If you encounter any issues, refer to the official documentation for troubleshooting.

Rust toolchain

The ESP32-C5 uses a 32-bit RISC-V processor, so we can use the standard Rust toolchain. We do not need espup, which is used for ESP chips that require the Xtensa Rust toolchain.

Install the required Rust components:

rustup component add rust-src
rustup target add riscv32imac-unknown-none-elf

cargo-binstall

This is to install Rust binaries without building from source using cargo install or manually downloading packages, you can use cargo-binstall. We’ll use this tool to install the espflash tool next.

cargo install cargo-binstall

espflash

“espflash is a serial flasher utility, based on esptool.py, for Espressif SoCs and modules.” This will be the tool used (when we are not using probe-rs) to put our code into the device and run it.

cargo binstall espflash

If you encounter any problems, you can try installing the exact version used when this book was written.

cargo binstall espflash@4.6.0

After installation, type the espflash command to verify that it works.

espflash --version

Template by ESP-RS

We will be using the templates provided by ESP-RS, which offer two sets:

• esp-generate: A no_std template. This is the one we will focus on most of the time.
• esp-idf-template: A std template.

esp-generate

The esp-generate tool is used for creating no_std applications. Currently, it supports the ESP32, ESP32-C2/C3/C6, ESP32-H2, and ESP32-S2/S3.

cargo install esp-generate --locked

If you want to follow the code exactly as it is in this project, install this esp-generate version used for generating the examples:

cargo install esp-generate@1.4.0 --locked

Creating project with esp-generate

For this book, we will be using the ESP32-C5. I highly recommend using the same hardware to make it easier to follow along.

esp-generate PROJECT_NAME

USB Access

On Linux, your user needs permission to access the USB serial port used by the ESP32-C5. Add your user to the dialout group:

sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER

Log out and back in for the changes to take effect.