ESP32 wear levelling mkfatfs

This tool creates ESP32 fatfs images with wear levelling support.

Operation

Requirements

This tool requires esp-idf to be set up properly. If you do run into issues building the tool check that the environment variable IDF_PATH points to your installation directory of esp-idf.

IMPORTANT: Please make sure you are using at recent version of esp-idf (at least v3.2).

Configuration

At the moment configuration is done via the file sdkconfig/sdkconfig.h. I plan on adding a menuconfig though. See section Limitations at the end of this docuemnt for limits on valid configuration values.

IMPORTANT: Do not forget to place your partition table in the file partitions.csv

Building

Building the tool should be straight forward. Just type make

This will create the tool binary called mkfatfs

Usage

To build a fatfs image with wear levelling support just place all files you want to have in you fatfs in a directory and run

./mkfatfs -c <dir name here> fatfs.img

This will create the file fatfs.img containing the fatfs image.

To flash the image to your ESP run

python2 "$IDF_PATH"/components/esptool_py/esptool/esptool.py --chip esp32 --port /dev/ttyUSB0 --baud 230400 --before default_reset --after hard_reset write_flash --flash_mode dio --flash_size 4MB 0x130000 fatfs.img

Depending on your partition layout you might have to update the address argument in above command

Issues? Check out the section Troubleshooting at the end of this document

List of options

Usage: ./mkfatfs [-c <fatfs directory>] [-t <partition table>] [-l <partition label>] <fatfs image name>
Options:
     -c <fatfs directory>   Set directory to build fatfs from to <fatfs directory>. Defaults to 'image'
     -t <partition table>   Set file to read partition table from to <partition table>. Defaults to 'partition_table.bin'
     -l <partition label>   Set label of partition from partition table to use to <partition label>. Defaults to 'storage'

Limitations

Currently this tool supports only sector sizes of 4096 because the flash mocking code of esp-idf is not suitable for other sector sizes

Troubleshooting

Truncated file names

By default your fatfs might be set up to use short file names only. Please make sure to enable CONFIG_FATFS_LFN_HEAP or CONFIG_FATFS_LFN_STACK in menuconfig (thanks @sriharsha-rbnd for pointing this out)