Hacker News Reader

Is the Arduino IDE the best way to program these chips? Is there something more "professional", for Linux? Anyone programming with just CLI tools and without Arduino libs?

View on HN

Sure. I use the ESP32 (rather than the older ESP8266 mentioned here) and I program in C and the ESP API [1]. The provided software has a lot of features and is pretty nice to work with. There's also a vscode plugin which makes configuring and programming the device a breeze.

[1] https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32/...

Thanks. Aside, that looks a lot more developer-friendly than many other vendor-provided tools/frameworks I've seen in the past. I hope the others follow suit.

VSCode with the platformIO plugin is pretty good

Last time I looked, I thought that VSCode/PlatformIO supported both the ESP libraries (ESP-IDF) directly as well as the Arduino libraries (which I think are based on ESP-IDF.)

My personal preference is to use the Espressif libraries rather than Arduino libraries, but I used to program micro-controllers for a living so I'm more comfortable with that development environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com