Having Issues setting up/Adopting ESPHome onto Adafruit Feather ESP32S3 TFT

Hello Everyone,

I am new to ESPHome, ESP Devices, and Home Assistant in general, but I come from a programming background. I have been having some issues with setting up my Device via ESPHome and Home Assistant.

For Reference this is my device Adafruit ESP32-S3 TFT Feather - 4MB Flash, 2MB PSRAM, STEMMA QT : ID 5483 : $24.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

  • I already have ESPHome installed as an add-on via the add-on store(I also reinstalled it just in case).

  • I connect to ESPHome via the web portal because my HA doesn’t have SSL yet, and try get started with it.

  • I go through the options, select my device listed in the SErial POrt section, go to “make Adoptable” and i get error “Installation Failed. Try resetting your device or holding the BOOT button while selecting your serial port until it starts preparing the installation.”

I wasn’t sure what exactly they were referring to when “holding the boot button” when selecting the port, so I tried holding it in the port menu, as well as holding boot and then selecting the feather’s serial port and neither work.

Actually, sometimes if I hold boot too long, it will do something and give me an error that there is no serial connection or something and I cannot even get to the point to “make adoptable.” I also tried resetting the device and nothing happened.

I do also see this thread First ESPHome project (ESP32-S2 feather board) stuck on initial configuration install

which is the precursor S2 board to the board I have being the S3 Model. I’m wondering if there is something similar, or maybe the S3 devices are not supported yet!? The user mentioned that when they connected the devide to their Pi it worked, but i’m using VMWare, and if I connect the device to the HA instance running in VMware it will just remove it from the list of Serial Ports and I cannot go from there. I’m not sure if I tried connecting it when it was at point asking to adopt, but nothing so far has worked.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to what might be going on? I was hoping this would be simple and my device would work/configure easily, but maybe I need to get an older/more-established device? I wonder if the S2 feather would work, but I wonder if I would have issues like the above? The only reason I got this Feather was because I liked having the TFT Display. I just need an Adafruit Feather that I can connect my temp/humidity sensor to, via Stemma QT, that will work with ESPHome(If this one doesn’t work). I did also purchase this Feather for another project, and even though it doesn’t have Stemma QT, I can connect the Stemma QT wires up into the headers and it should still work with the sensor. Would this be a better board I wonder? I will try it myself as well and see it if works, and will update after.

adafruit com/product/3619 (as a new user I can only post 2 links so I had to break this link)

Assembled Adafruit HUZZAH32 – ESP32 Feather Board, is the board name

If there is anything I should provide please let me know. In other cases there is mention of a “Log File” but I cannot see where that is? There is “Logs” for my device, but that just shows the code that is running on my device and the output from the code. Maybe this is where I should be looking? I’ll stop the output and see if I can see anything there as well, and will update my findings.

Any and all help is appreciated, thank you so much!

Just an update. The Adafruit HUZZAH32 Assembled Adafruit HUZZAH32 – ESP32 Feather Board [with Stacking Headers] : ID 3619 : $21.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

Does in fact connect, adopt, and work flawlessly, so It seems the issue comes with this S3 or maybe the TFT device?

I have everything setup on the HUZZAH, but I was hoping to use that for other things, and have a dedicated device for the sensors.

Does anyone have any list of devices that work or some sort or resource or know what devices would work for my needs?

Also to note, the Feather TFT doesn’t appear as a COM device on Windows 7, but the HUZZAH32 does. I read there were driver issues with newer devices, as the last update was Nov 2020, so that makes sense the newer device wouldn’t be included.

However on linux even if it shows up as a COM port, it still wont install/adopt no matter what I try, while the HUZZAH32 instantly will install, and I had reinstalled/readopted a few times with no issues.

Thank you for any help with either helping me get this TFT s3 working, or finding another device I could use as I rather not use this HUZZAH in it’s current state. Maybe I can find a similar one.