Flash Memory Size

[jeyeager (Jason Yeager)]

@Michael_Melancon

That’s all correct. That’s all what I was saying up above

Yea, for whatever reason it didn’t click for me until now. I messed with these a little bit when working on my wireless pendant but was still just using existing partition files.

@Michael_Melancon

just size the application and OTA partition to the same size as the 4MB partition file.

Agreed. My thoughts here are more for 4MB ESP32s than 8MB. The 1.77MB I have on 8MB is more than enough.

@Michael_Melancon

I would also be careful about trying to jam so much stuff into FLASH, as it is known to cause instability reading from it while the CNC is moving.

Agreed. I’m not looking to go crazy.

@Michael_Melancon

I would be careful about pushing that idea into the broader community and risking destabilizing the CNCs.

Having 4 or 6MB of flash storage is probably in the realm of concern which isn’t my goal here. This whole topic is on the advanced side and is probably questionable for the average user. I’m currently pondering this because of building a pen plotter that I might want some extra space for, although I’ll still use an 8MB ESP32 where it doesn’t matter.

@Michael_Melancon

You can order official ESP32 DevKits with 8MB as well

I haven’t been able to find them.

[Michael_Melancon (Mike M)]

@jeyeager

I haven’t been able to find them.

I found them maybe a year or so ago… can’t remember where. If I come across it again one day I’ll post it…

If it’s not for FluidNC, then I would look more at the S3s anyway if looking for more capable ESP32s for pet projects. They come with more RAM, more flash, and more GPIOs

[jeyeager (Jason Yeager)]

If you have a 4 MB ESP32, you can get 1.89 MB of Flash space by killing the ability to update OTA.

Warning: I’ve only done this on an ESP32 not connected to a Jackpot although there’s no reason it wouldn’t work. Do you need to do this? No. Should you do it anyway? Probably not.

Chances are you’ve never updated OTA. I haven’t. That allows you to upload the firmware.bin file via the WebUI to update the firmware. You can still update via PlatformIO and the FluidNC Web Installer.

To do this:

1. In the root directory (the one that contains platformio.ini), create a file called custom_littlefs.csv with the following as the contents:

# Name,   Type, SubType, Offset,  Size, Flags
nvs,      data, nvs,     0x9000,  0x5000,
otadata,  data, ota,     0xe000,  0x2000,
app0,     app,  ota_0,   0x10000, 0x1E0000,
spiffs,   data, spiffs,  0x1F0000,0x210000,

2. Update platformio_override.ini (or create if it doesn’t exist) with the following content:

[common_esp32_base]
board_build.partitions = custom_littlefs.csv
board_upload.maximum_size = 4194304
board_upload.flash_size = 4MB

3. Do a normal PlatformIO flash.

After you do this once, you can go back to using the Web Installer going forward. Just use “firmware-update” and not "fresh-install*.

[MakerJim]

@jeyeager

you can get 1.89 MB of Flash space by killing the ability to update OTA.

You’re always 2 steps ahead

This was on my “figure out how to do it” list.
THANK YOU!