Prerequisites¶
Before installing anything, line up the accounts, access, and hardware you will need.
Accounts and access¶
- A GitHub account. Use a real name you are comfortable with; this is where your thesis work will live.
- Membership in the Boomchecker GitHub organization. Ask Martin Maxa
(
maxamart@fel.cvut.cz) to add you to the organization and grant access to the monorepo. You cannot push branches until you are a member — see Contributing for the branch + PR workflow. - Git installed (covered later inside the devcontainer, but you also want it on the host to clone the repo). On Windows it comes with Git for Windows.
Hardware¶
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| A reasonably modern laptop/PC (8 GB RAM minimum, 16 GB comfortable) | Docker + the toolchain are not tiny. |
| Windows 11, or Windows 10 version 2004+ (build 19041+) | Required for WSL2. Check with winver. |
| Admin rights on the machine | WSL2, Docker Desktop, and usbipd all need it to install. |
| An ESP32 / STM32 dev board + USB cable | Only if you do firmware work and want to flash real hardware. |
Use a data cable, not a charge-only cable
Many USB cables only carry power. If your board never shows up as a serial port, swap the cable before debugging anything else.
Operating system notes¶
This is the primary, fully documented path. Continue to Install WSL2.
You do not need WSL or usbipd. Install Docker Engine and VS Code natively, then
jump to Open the devcontainer. USB devices are already visible
to Docker via /dev, so flashing just works.
Install Docker Desktop for Mac and VS Code, then go to Open the devcontainer. Note: USB serial passthrough into a Linux container on macOS is not reliable — for flashing real hardware, prefer a Windows or Linux machine. App/script development works fine.
What you do not install¶
You will not install ESP-IDF, Go, Node.js, Python, pnpm, or Doxygen on your host machine. All of that lives inside the devcontainer. Resist the urge — installing them by hand is exactly what the devcontainer exists to avoid.
Next: Install WSL2 →