Sometimes it's the little things

I've been trying to get the Arduino environment for the Atmel AVR, the Microchip PIC32 and the ESP8266 working. Can't say that the Arduino IDE is one of my favorite environments to work with. The library structure is maddening (wait, there are 2 similar libraries and there's an error and you won't tell me where it is?). I'm glad that I can use an external editor, too bad I can't call a utility to tell it to compile and update in an easy fashion. There are Makefiles I can get and I will look into those. It's not the worst environment but it does make supporting the programs (sketches) a pain. Oh, and forget about debugging without using print statements.

Now, I recently tried to add the latest ESP8266 environment to the Arduino and ran into the infamous: "(platform esp8266, package esp8266) is unknown". I found a number of solutions but none were quite clear about the fix (below). Seems that when I initially install the ESP8266 it installed the 1.6.4-673-g8cd3697 package of the ESP8266 (found in ${HOME}/.arduino15/packages/esp8266/hardware/esp8266/1.6.4-673-g8cd3697). Because I had switched over the a new release (2.3.0-rc1) but I failed to remove the previous release, I got the '... unknown' error. Once I found the fix ( rm -rf ${HOME}/.arduino15/packages/esp8266/hardware/esp8266/1.6.4-673-g8cd3697 ), I was able to properly compile sketches for the ESP8266. Hopefully this post will help someone else to find it quicker. Sometimes an internet search gives you too much general information or too out dated information, or both.

Arduino "(platform esp8266, package esp8266) is unknown"