ESP32 Boards Manager 3 - Upgrade your Older Code

ESP32 Boards Manager 3 for the Arduino IDE offers a wealth of improvements and new features, but it renders a lot of older code incompatible. Today, we’ll look at Boards Manager 3 and see the changes you’ll need to make to update your old sketches.

Article with code: https://dronebotworkshop.com/esp32-boards-manager-3
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Since July 2024, Espressif’s ESP32 Boards Manager 3 has been the default boards manager for ESP32 boards. That was about the time that some of your older code, and a lot of the code I provided here in the DroneBot Workshop, started to fail to compile.

Boards Manager 3 offers a wealth of improvements and new features, but it also has changed how many ESP32 APIs function. Some features have been removed and replaced with new features; some are the same but with different syntax or mandatory fields.

This is not a minor update, and it coincides with the release of Espressif’s ESP-IDF Version 5.3, the “official” ESP32 development platform. Version 3 brings a lot of the power and capabilities of this complex development environment to the Arduino IDE.

Version 3 also supports more hardware, including the ESP32-C6 and ESP32-H3 SOCs.

Of course, I can’t cover all of these updates in one video, not even one that's 45 minutes long! Instead, I will focus on three major areas:

I2S - The audio service supported by the ESP32.
ESP-NOW - The ESP32 peer-to-peer networking service.
LEDC - The LED Controller, also used as a PWM generator.

Here is the Table of Contents for today's video:

00:00 - Introduction
02:03 - ESP32 Boards Manager 3
06:45 - Keeping Version 2
11:27 - ci.json File
12:41 - Updated - I2S
22:28 - Updated - ESP-NOW
33:29 - Updated - LEDC
42:21 - Conclusion

The article on the DroneBot Workshop website has more information and links to several resources by Espressif that can help you. Check it out at https://dronebotworkshop.com/esp32-boards-manager-3.

Hope you enjoy the video!

Bill