Building

Much more interesting than just flashing your device is to install spangap and compile for yourself.

At this very early stage of their development, both Spangap and Reticulous still lack some of the documentation they will have soon. But to get you started if you can’t wait for everything to be finished, here is a very quick description of how to build and flash the software.

What the host needs

docker, installed and running, plus python, git and curl. Nothing will be installed on your system outside of the spangap project directory you initialize. The procedure below should work for Linux, Mac and possibly also for Windows Subsystem for Linux — the latter untested as of now.

A worked example

Say you are in your home directory on a Mac, and want to build Reticulous and run it on the LilyGo T-Deck Plus connected to /dev/cu.usbmodem2101.

First install spangap:

curl -fsSL https://spangap.org/install.sh | sh

Then create the workspace and start a serial monitor:

spangap init reticulous && \
cd reticulous && \
spangap monitor /dev/cu.usbmodem2101

Leave spangap monitor running. It shows you the device log output, and once we’re done it will let you switch to CLI mode by simply typing a command.

Now open another terminal window and do:

cd reticulous && \
spangap build reticulous/reticulous --with spangap/hw-lilygo-tdeck && \
spangap flash

After downloading and building, it tells the monitor window to flash the firmware. When that’s done the device resets and comes alive.

Building for a different board

Replace hw-lilygo-tdeck with any of the other board straddles listed in the overview — hw-heltecv4, hw-meshnology-w12, hw-wismesh-tap-v2 and the rest.

Leave off --with ... entirely to get the generic build, which works on any ESP32-S3 with at least 4 MB of PSRAM and 8 MB of flash. To target a generic board whose flash size you need to state, use --flash-size <n>, where <n> is the number of megabytes of flash your ESP32-S3 has. Use spangap probe [<serial port>] to find out whether your ESP32 has PSRAM and how much flash it has.