Using esp-azure with PlatformIO IDE
I, most of the time, play around with many things including using esp-azure which should be used with Espressif IoT Development Framework (ESP-IDF) directly instead of using ESP-IDF with PlatformIO IDE. The reason I’m writing this on Medium is it might help anyone walking the same path as I did.
I conducted training for a participant from another part of the world who wanted to use Azure IoT Hub with ESP32 and ESP-IDF as the framework. The support for ESP-IDF on editors like Visual Studio Code isn’t as good as today at that time. So, we decided to use PlatformIO IDE (PlatformIO Core + VSCode). Debugging using a graphical user interface is also one of the big factors in deciding to use PlatformIO IDE.
The library that we used is called esp-azure, a port of Azure IoT SDK for C programming language so that it can be used with Espressif SoCs especially ESP32. This library takes a bit of work before it can be used with PlatformIO IDE.
Creating a CMakeLists.txt File
Until now, esp-azure only has a component.mk file that is used by ESP-IDF version 3 and below. We used ESP-IDF version 4 which uses CMake instead of GNU Make, so we need to create the CMakeLists.txt file for esp-azure.
Compiling the Code
Create a components directory in the root directory of the project. Copy esp-azure to components directory, then run pio run -t menuconfig to configure the ESP-IDF. Running menuconfig also forces the PlatformIO IDE to detect the CMakeLists.txt that we created.
Run pio run to compile the code and see if everything compiles without error.
