Prerequisites for developing

Prerequisites are the prerequisites for deploying, plus:

• Visual Studio Code installed
• PlatformIO for Visual Studio Code installed
• CMake installed
• CMake Tools extension for Visual Studio Code installed
• In Visual Studio Code, open a PlaformIO Command Line Interface and enter

  pio platform update
  

• If your user directory name contains a whitespace, you may need to change the platformio.ini file. To avoid the error message "Error: Detected a whitespace character in project paths" when building an ESP-IDF project with PlatformIO, add the following lines to the platformio.ini file, as documented in https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/frameworks/espidf.html#limitations:
  

  [platformio]
  core_dir = <path_without_whitespaces>
  

• This GitHub repository cloned

Refer to developing using a devcontainer should you prefer that way of developing.

Coding and uploading

We recommend using a device without secure boot for developing. Follow the steps below to build the firmware and flash it to a device:

1. In the top-left corner, select File -> Open Folder.
2. Select the folder where you cloned or extracted the repository.
3. Wait for PlatformIO to finish initialization. This step is done until you no longer see "PlatformIO: Loading tasks..." in the VS Code status bar. > ⚠️ This step is important! This may take up to ±10 minutes. If you do not wait for this to finish, the project will not be able to build correctly.
4. In the src folder you will find main.cpp; this is an example application.
5. In the lib folder you will find the library that this repository contains.
6. To change between provisioning via BLE or SoftAP, in the platformio.inifile, comment the line including -DCONFIG_EXAMPLE_PROV_TRANSPORT_BLE and uncomment the line including -DCONFIG_EXAMPLE_PROV_TRANSPORT_SOFTAP or vice versa.
7. Change the code in src/main.c as you see fit.
8. Build the firmware. See also our documentation on how to build NeedForHeat firmware