ok my friend you are a genius. I think you are onto something and maybe we are very close to figuring this thing out. I looked at the logs and it was only getting TX.
so this is a picture of the board that the USB dongle plugs in to:
This board looks identical on both 3rd and 4th gen.
I guess I never tried this combination before. I just took the 3rd gen’s board (from the pic) with my esp dongle in there, and plugged it into the little connector, and it was reporting and controlling my 4th gen beautifully.
Then I plugged the new 4th gen one back in with my 3rd gen esp dongle, and it was also only getting tx.
So I think you’re right, there’s either a contact issue, and maybe I need to either solder directly onto this board from the photo instead of going over usb, or I could just try reflashing the OEM mr cool dongle that has the ESP chip on it, but then I’d have to figure out all of it’s GPIO pins, right?
I’m comparing the two and they look identical to me. Here’s a photo front and back, the one with the USB plugged in is the 3rd gen.
edit: photos have seemed to be cropped, in the front photo, the top one is the 3rd gen
But this is the problematic component for sure.