Install ESP32 Filesystem Uploader in Arduino IDE

Software IDE 2.x
1

I have followed the installation steps correctly, why is it not displayed in the tools section: "ESP32 Sketch Data Upload" ? I have performed a reset of the Arduino IDE. I use arduino IDE version 2.2.1

image
image719×170 6.72 KB

image
image439×516 8.87 KB

image

2

Hi @bdk622001. Arduino IDE 2.x is a complete rewrite of the Arduino IDE on a different framework and in a new language. The "Tools" system of Arduino IDE 1.x used by the Tool (AKA "plugin") you were using with the old IDE is very specific to the Java language that version series of Arduino IDE was written in, so it was not possible to add support for Arduino IDE 1.x Tools to Arduino IDE 2.x.

Full support for making equivalent (and even better) expansions on the default capabilities of Arduino IDE was recently added to Arduino IDE. However, it will still be necessary for the community to create Arduino IDE 2.x extensions to replace the Arduino IDE 1.x tools, and as far as I know nobody has done that yet for the ESP32 filesystem upload tools (though it has now been done for the ESP8266 and RP2040 microcontrollers so there is reason to hope it might happen sometime in the near future).

For now, the most simple solution is to use Arduino IDE 1.x when you need to upload a filesystem to your ESP32 board. The download links for Arduino IDE 1.x are listed here:

https://www.arduino.cc/en/software#legacy-ide-18x

You can have Arduino IDE 1.x and 2.x installed at the same time without any problems, so if you prefer Arduino IDE 2.x you can continue to use it except for when you need to use the tool to upload a filesystem.

Alternative Solution

An alternative solution is to use command line tools to directly upload filesystems to your ESP32.

Under the hood, what the "ESP32 sketch data upload" Tool does is:

  1. Generate a SPIFFS filesystem image from the contents of the data subfolder of your sketch.
  2. Upload the filesystem to the ESP32 board.

It does these things using two command line tools:

So instead of using the "ESP32 sketch data upload" Tool from Arduino IDE, you can just work directly with those two tools from the command line terminal.

There is some information on that here:

https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/api-reference/storage/spiffs.html

3

To my knowledge the authors of the tool need to rewrite their tools to work with IDE 2.x; I do not know what the status of that exercise is.

IDE 1.x was based on java, IDE 2.x is not.

OK, @ptillisch did beat me to it and with far more details.

4

Sorry but I've been there too .. probably this feedback is correct but totally unusable for novice users. Can some time be iinvestef to build an upload tool that works?

5

Good news, everyone! Support for uploading filesystems to ESP32 boards has now been added to the "arduino-littlefs-upload" extension I mentioned earlier in the thread: