After tinkering (and abusing) esp devboards for almost 10 years, I got my first dead board today. Not abused this time though.
Quite new C3 supermini, nothing wired, not even pin-headers soldered. Hanging in free air on USB cable, connected to my trusted laptop for USB logging, doing next to nothing and running cool.
Logs don’t show anything abnormal until sudden disconnect after 18 hours.
Voltage regulator outputs correctly 3.29V, power-LED is on, but board draws no current beyond that LED. All resistances between 3v3/gnd/gpio pins look normal. No signs of overheating or any visually damaged components.
Any thoughts about the failure mechanism?
did you try another usb power source/cable? feed it with 5V or 3.3V directly to the pins? maybe the device is stuck in a bootloop? is there code uploaded to the device? if so, did you try run it on another module?
Thank’s for your time and thoughts!
I agree, it could draw current at 1uA level, I have no practical way of measuring it. And this supermini-size is discouraging for any physical intervention.
I see pullup on EN next to reset button on schematics though.
I missed that. You are probably right that it is dead. I would probably check that the reset button is not shorted and that the EN pin is high. If those are fine, I would declare it dead.
Well, I’m not crying after that.
But it looks like I can’t naively expect that new boards are just good and I should do some test drive before using them for some circuit.
