how to use esp-web-tools to flash my esp-hal app from a web page?

[yanshay]

esp-web-tools allows to set up a simple web page to flash the binaries to the device without the need for a complete toolset (works from chrome and edge only though).

Need to provide a manifest.json similar to the below as well as binary files:

{
  "name": "Squeezelite-ESP32 for I2S",
  "version": "1.1023",
  "home_assistant_domain": "slim_player",
  "funding_url": "https://esphome.io/guides/supporters.html",
  "builds": [
    {
      "chipFamily": "ESP32",
      "parts": [
        { "path": "firmware/bootloader.bin", "offset": 4096 },
        { "path": "firmware/partition-table.bin", "offset": 32768 },
        { "path": "firmware/ota_data_initial.bin", "offset": 53248 },
        { "path": "firmware/recovery.bin", "offset": 65536 },
        { "path": "firmware/i2s.bin", "offset": 1376256 }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Since I'm using cargo run and everything magically happens, I don't really know what are really all the files that eventually get flashed to the device.

• is there a place that documents what exactly is getting flashed in case of a esp-hal project?

• I found that cargo esp-flash --save-image can generate a file, single file and not so many in the example above, so maybe that's what I need to supply instead of so many files?

• And if using that file, does it need to be flashed as is at offset 0?

I tried the above and I get an error from the esp-web-tools "Timed out waiting for packet header", and with the example binaries it is flashing, so it looks like it has to do with the binary I generated using cargo esp-flash. Any ideas what could be wrong?

• Last, Is there a risk that by flashing in a wrong way I'll completely brick the device making it unusable?

[bjoernQ]

There was https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-web-flash-server but it's more or less abandoned and will probably get archived (i.e. outdated) but you might get some inspiration from it

[yanshay]

I see it also flash in parts.
Where do I find the different files? bootloader.bin, partition-table.bin, and the proper binary for the app?

I thought that in order to simpligy, cargo espflash save-image --merge --release --chip esp32 image.bin would generate the single binary that contains everything required, starting at offset 0, but that doesn't seem to work for some reason.