ESPAsyncWebServer VS PlatformIO

Use esp async Webserver https://github.com/me-no-dev/ESPAsyncWebServer

I don't know what you're doing wrong, but maybe you could change to the ESPAsyncWebServer instead of the fork you're using. Since me-no-dev works at espressif, it seems like that's basically the official webserver to use and I don't see that dvarrel did much good to it in their fork.

For something that's supposed to run at home and not be accessible from the broader Internet, you would do this by having your ESP8266 run as a WiFi client in your home internet and then using something like the EspAsynchWebServer library to make it a mini webserver than can receive requests from any browser in any of your home devices.

There is a library called ESPAsynchWebServer that will easilly allow you to run a webserver in your code on the ESP32 and ESP8266 chips with Arduino and if you check their simple example you can see it's reasonably easy to have the code for doing stuff on the hardware side (say, toggle the pin that controlls an LED) as part of the code that receives and processes HTTP requests.

Check out EspAsyncWebServer, it’s documentation will make clear how it would allow you to do this if you use it.

Go get EspAsynchServer. Check here.

I don't know what kind of Arduino you are using, but I would never try to implement a HTTP server that wasn't asynchronous. Typically using https://github.com/me-no-dev/ESPAsyncWebServer

I would make the ESP32 serve up a web page that displays the battery status, and also handle a button click that turns on or off the relay. You are looking at using https://github.com/me-no-dev/ESPAsyncWebServer

For the ESP32 in read mode, we've successfully developed a project using PlatformIO that accepts the key during build time and stores it in memory.

Check out Zephyr OS and Platform IO. Zephyr is part of the Linux foundation and has similarities to Linux with how it performs hardware abstraction (device tree). Platform IO integrates with other frameworks including mbed and Arduino.

PlatformIO together with avr-stub can be used to do source level debugging but there are some caveats.

Look into https://platformio.org/, it can abstract over a few RTOSes, and can show you which OSes work with which chips/boards.

If the HW looks like it works, you could also try alternate programming software. (e.g. TinyGo or PlatformIO)

You might have better luck with PlatformIO than the Arduino IDE; it's better at automatically choosing the serial port, though I can't say I've used it under Windows.

My other suggestion takes more work but will make your life oh so much better. Professionally I have used and highly recommend. https://platformio.org/ which is free!

Will you be doing embedded Linux? Embedded RTOS? Bare metal? Microcontrollers? SoC (say, FPGA with a hard processor core)?

You can do a lot with QEMU. https://bootlin.com/ has a lot of great, free training material.

https://bootlin.com/doc/training/embedded-linux-qemu/embedde...

is one of my favorites.

Learning to cross-compile, do embedded debugging, the process of booting an embedded system (which varies depending on the answers to the above questions), learning how to read a technical reference for the processor you’re using as well as for peripherals you’re likely to interact with - SPI, i2c, UART, maybe PCIe, are all handy skills. Learn a bit about JTAG, hardware, reading schematics, etc. Even being able solder is helpful.

There may be books (I had a great embedded Linux book when I started) but there are lots of online materials too. Check out https://platformio.org/

There are fun embedded boards and projects for microcontrollers too - micropython on an rpi pico, tinygo, eLua, etc.