Table of content
* Introduction
* System packages
* NuttX sources and tools
* Configuration of devkit project, compilation and flash
* Connexion to NSH via (USB) serial
* The ostest and other basic sets (UPDATE)
* The apps examples (UPDATE)
* GPIO (UPDATE)
* SPIflash, SMARTFS and file fsystems (UPDATE)
* TMPFS (UPDATE)
* NSH scripting (UPDATE)
Introduction
Apache NuttX is a POSIX embedded system available on a lot of microcontrollers boards and architectures. After seeing some articles from Lup Yuen Lee, installing and working with NuttX on Bouffalo BL602 and BL604 RISC-V microcontroller boards, I discovered it can be installed on one of my boards. So I tried and managed to install it this evening on my recently acquired 3.5€ ESP32-C3S SoC nodeMCU board. ESP32-C3 is a SoC with RISC-V RV32IMC microcontroller, integrated 2.4GHz WiFi and Bluetooth LTE. The board contains a CH340 serial-USB converter, so it can easily be used/flashed/debugged from a computer. I already made a post about installing ESP-IDF tools and flashing examples on this RISC-V board.
For people that already know Espressif SoCs, here is a table of the power usage of some of their ESP models:
SoC Modem sleep Light sleep mode Deep sleep mode
ESP8266 20 mA 2,000 µA 20 µA
ESP32 20 mA 800 µA 20 µA
ESP32-C3 20 mA 130 µA 5 µA
This article explains the procedure to prepare environment, on Arch Linux in November 2021. This is for x86_64, but should work on ARM too, only RISC-V toolchains are missing on ALARM, can be compiled, by using x86_64 versions of PKGBUILD (riscv32-elf-binutils, riscv64-elf-gcc). You can find the pricompiled binaries in my ArchLinux ARM archives including a little text about the order of compilation (binlib, gcc-bootstrap, newlib, gcc (and optionnaly, gcc and newlib again). Direct link to the three most usefull archives:
* riscv32-elf-binutils-2.36.1-2-armv7h.pkg.tar.xz
* riscv64-elf-gcc-11.1.0-1-armv7h.pkg.tar.xz
* riscv64-elf-newlib-4.1.0-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
Latest GIT version is needed In November 2021 for ESP32-C3, some other RISC-V architectures are already in stable releases. This is followed by an example of flashing and connect to the NSH shell, via serial on USB terminal. The dependencies for Debian based Linux on the official page, some parts could be incomplete. Some aspects of the NuttX, POSIX compatible Filesystem. OStest, GPIO and SPIflash included examples are also shortly described. Continue reading