Accept VID/PID or configuration file from CLI or environment

[chrysn]

Motivations

I'm building applications that can be built for and flashed onto different devices, with different options running on different ESPs or other chips. (This is enabled by Ariel OS).

At the time of building/flashing, I know what device family I'm building for, and I can keep track of which VID/PID pair that presents to the flasher, but the VID/PID is not something constant I can put into a file in the project.

• Would you like to implement this feature? yes (if you can give a preference for the solution)

Solution

Passing in either a VID/PID pair or just the name of a config file to be read instead of the local one would be viable options.

The one that would be most practical for me would just to accept VID and PID on the CLI, eg. as:

$ espflash flash --port-vid-pid 303a:1001 target/some/path.elf

A more general solution would be to accept the configuraton file through either input way (I have no preference which):

$ ESPFLASH_CONFIG=variants/ulanzi-tc001/espflash.config espflash flash target/some/path.elf
$ espflash --config variants/ulanzi-tc001/espflash.config flash target/some/path.elf

Alternatives

I could chdir into a per-build directory, place a config file there, and then run the flasher, but that appears to me like a crude workaround.

I could run a manual process to identify which --port currently corresponds to my known VID/PID, but that's a lot of duplication for something that is already in espflash.

Additional context

I started sketching that before I opened #1022; without that PR, adding this would be more urgent. (But I'd PR it anyway after getting some feedback of which of the 3-4 ways to get the state in you prefer).

[SergioGasquez]

Hi @chrysn! I think having a --port-vid-pid cli argument would be a good solution, if you are happy to work on it, I would definitely review it and include it on v4.4 so we can release it soon!

[SergioGasquez]

Hi! We will be releasing espflash@4.4 most likely this or next week, if this is something urgent for you, let us know to see how to proceed.

[chrysn]

Thanks for the hint. With #1022 resolved, this is not urgent but merely a quality-of-use concern. I still plan on adding it, but that won't be this week.

(For tracking, also adding it to the Ariel OS project tracker; there, once this is done, we can start setting those arguments from our boards knowledge, so that users only get the selection dialog if there are actually indistinguishable boards connected.)