Custom partition table for Nano ESP32 with IDE 2.x

Development Tools IDE 2.x
1

Hello,

my sketch includes large images for use with EEZ Studio UI and compiles to a binary sizes exceeding the Nano ESP32 maximum app size of ~3M. As the Nano has 16M flash I'm hoping to be able to increase the size of the app partition to at least 10M. How could I achieve that?
I don't need OTA or FAT, so a single app partition is fine for me.

However, I'm a bit lost how I can customize the partition table for the Nano ESP32 and use it.
Is there a recommended way to achieve this?

What I tried so far:
IDE v2.3.4 lets me choose between "with FAT partition (default)" and "with SPIFFS partition (advanced), which don't make a difference for me in max app size.

It seems like for general ESP32 boards there is an option "custom partition", but that is not available for Nano ESP32.

I tried placing a custom "partitions.csv" file in my sketch folder, its content seems to be ignored, max app size is still the 3M. When I edit the file to have invalid entries I get an error message, so the file is somehow recognized.

I also tried following the steps in Arduino Nano ESP32 Partition Problem with dfu-util without success. Always the same error message with the same size limit.

In a desperate move I even tried modifying the partition files located in \AppData\Local\Arduino15\packages\arduino\hardware\esp32\2.0.18-arduino.5\tools\partitions, but with no effect either.
To my surprise, even when I delete the complete content of that folder the IDE would still compile my code and terminate with the "Sketch is too big" error.

Any help or hint how to proceed here is welcome.

Thank you in advance!

2

Here is how I got a Nano ESP32 to load the partition table. The problem is that dfu-util does not load the partition table. First I put my partition.csv file in the sketch folder. Then I did the following. You will want to check the docs to see if B1 to Ground doesn't do something awful to your chip.

I do have it working. I performed the following steps with a dummy sketch (think Blink) so the sketch didn't expect anything beyond the basic ESP32 functionality (no trying to use WiFi, Bluetooth, etc., which would vary from my board to the ESP32 board I'm going to tell the IDE I have connected).

Disconnect the USB port
Ground the B1 pin
Connect the USB port
Tell the IDE that I have a UM Tiny S3
Upload the Blink sketch with my partition table selected
Unground the B1 pin
Press the RST button
Now I have my partition table loaded. I can now proceed with my production sketch, telling the IDE that I have an Arduino Nano ESP32 (ESP32) board, selecting the port, building, etc.

I never did get either IDE to use anything but the dfu-util to upload to the board when it was configured for the Arduino Nano ESP32. Looking at the boards.txt, it doesn't appear that the IDE would ever use anything else.

Thank you for your help!!