Converting a Unique ID Into .bin File For Production

[tkowalski887]

Okay Arduino Community. I am at my whits end with this dilemma and I'm sure many of you can point me in the right direction.

I have a program developed in Arduino that I want to upload to custom built PCB's with ESP32's at production capacity. This is not a major issue and I've addressed this is in the past by generating a .bin file from Arduino IDE and using that .bin file on ESP's flash download tool. Easy peasy.

However, this particular program I developed uses a unique ID (serial number) and also an X.509 certificate of authority to authenticate itself when connecting to a server. Each device will have its own certificate and its own unique ID. At the moment, I have two separate header files that I generate, one for the certificate and one for the unique ID. How do I avoid compiling this code in Arduino for each device to create the .bin file that I need?

What I would like to do is create both header files and somehow convert them to .bin files to be used in the ESP flash tool, but I don't even know if that's possible. What do people typically do in this situation?

Thanks,
Trent

[sterretje]

What I would consider (as a non-ESP32 user):

After uploading your code (the "easy peasy" part), connect the board to a PC and have a means to upload certificate and ID via serial to e.g. LittleFS.

It would not be that much of a hassle as it can be the first step of a test procedure of the board.

[cedarlakeinstruments]

I would also use LittleFS to read a file, but it would probably be easier to use the ESP filesystem uploader plugin so you could do it all from inside the IDE.