Building runtime

In this document, we will guide you through the compilation of the Jaculus runtime — the firmware you flash into ESP32 to turn it into a powerful Jaculus device.

Prerequisities

Jaculus runtime is developed directly in ESP-IDF. Therefore, to build the runtime, you need to setup ESP-IDF development environment on your computer.

Please follow the getting started guide for ESP-IDF. It will guide you through:

• toolchain installation,
• getting ESP-IDF, and
• setting up related tools.

Once you have it, open a terminal in the runtime directory. A side note: the commands below assume ESP-IDF is installed in the default locations. If you changed them, you have to change the commands accordingly.

First, you have to setup environmental variables into your terminal. This has to be done for every terminal window you open:

• Linux/MacOS: . $HOME/esp/esp-idf/export.sh
• Windows CMD: %userprofile%\esp\esp-idf\export.bat
• Windows PowerShell: .$HOME/esp/esp-idf/export.ps1

Then you can build the firmware by invoking idf.py build. Note that the initial build might take a while and you need internet connection — several external dependencies are fetched during the initial build.

Then you can upload the firmware into the microcontroller cia idf.py flash and open a serial terminal via idf.py monitor.