Progress Report - July 9, 2022

[BrucePerens]

I did not develop for a while due to a trip to London.

I wasn't satisfied with the compressed ROM filesystems available to me, and created a new one. Code for the host-side part is in
https://github.com/BrucePerens/rigcontrol/tree/main/components/generic_main/filesystem_generator

• fs_gen.c generates a compressed filesystem image using zlib on the host.
• fs_read.c reads a file from the compressed filesystem image, as a test and to show me how to code this on the ESP32.

The next step is to develop a handler for the compressed filesystem for the web server. This will usually not even bother to decompress, it will send a gzip-compressed file, which is a feature of the HTTP protocol, and just send the compressed data. But it will be able to decompress as a fallback if some odd client does not indicate that it can handle gzip compression.

ESP32 has the tinfl_decompress() function burned into the on-chip ROM, as it uses this in its FLASH functions. This is a zlib-compatible decompressor from Miniz.

Coding the web server handler will complete the work I had to do before starting to code the web GUI. The web GUI is plain HTML, Javascript, and CSS, so folks who know those things are welcome to join in.