I had a lot of frustration trying to run both painlessMesh and BLE at the same time, hitting errors of size limit on platformio, and not being able to target specific versions of ESP-IDF which add BLE support. In general, I found the platformio too unstable to be usable in a real world project just yet.

This repo includes everything that you might need to build and run an esp32 with BLE and painlessMesh, from ESP-IDF and its compiler to the libraries itself. You can use it as a boilerplate.

• Clone this repo and execute git submodule update --init --recursive to fetch all the files. The esp-idf repo is quite big, so it might take some time.
• Run make menuconfig to personalize your build. I've pre-selected some options, but you can configure it as you'd like. Please note, I've set it up for my board. You might need to change it.
• Run make to build everything. If you'd like to flash, run make flash. If you'd like to check the serial output, use make monitor. If you want to combine everything, use make flash monitor. You can also add -jN to speed up the compilation by using parallel jobs. The final command would be: make -j4 flash monitor (where 4 is your number of cores).

NOTE: On menuconfig, most probably you'll need to change the python path. I'm using python2, since that's what's available in my OS. If python 2 is your default, you might need to change it to just python.

The general idea is that you're using ESP-IDF directly, and adding the Arduino layer as a component.

Then each library is added as a component. The component.mk files define how it is added/included/compiled.

The main code is at main/main.cpp. If you want to use ESP-IDF APIs instead of executing Arduino, disable the Arduino autostart with make menuconfig.

• vendor/esp-idf is pinned to release/v2.1, which is the last known version to work well with painlessMesh.
• xtensa-esp32-elf is currently at version 1.22.0-61, which you can get here. This specific version is needed for ESP-IDF 2.1. If you plan to update ESP-IDF, you'll need to update the compiler too.
• arduino is pinned to commit d36e9bb, which is the latest version I could find that works with esp-idf 2.1 and BLE. The arduino repo for esp32 doesn't have versions yet, so I had to use a specific commit. If you find one that is better / newer, please tell me.
• ArduinoJson is at the version 5.11.2, which can be downloaded from here. Adding it as a submodule gave some errors at compile time, and since it's distributed as a single header file, I decided to add it precompiled.
• ESP32-BLE-Arduino is at version 0.4.2. You can get the original files from here.
• painlessMesh is at master (as of the time of writing). You can update it or pin it to a release tag without any problem.