When I connect it to usb It keeps connecting and disconnecting but when you look at the serial connection options its Com 4 the JTAG debug connection that keeps disconnecting. The ITEEC com port on COM 1 remains connected.
If I choose Com1 and try and install it says its connected but then fails each time. According to the instructions that come with the board here for flashing for the first time it says I need to put the board into download mode manually this is done by holding down the Boot button, clicking the reset button once and then releasing the boot button. I have tried all variations of holding down the buttons both while connected and while plugging in the USB. By following these instruction Com4 remains connected but I still cannot flash the device. I’ve tried holding down the reset button for 2 seconds as suggested by @Piter123Piter123Piotr in a similar thread, but that makes no difference
Does anyone have any suggestions. I seem to fail at the first hurdle with everything I touch
Have you tried to follow the directions in the link you provided to flash the blink.ino program to the board?
I haven’t had much luck with ESP Home Web on any of my dozens of ESP projects. I prefer to compile the binary for manual flashing then use ESP Home Flasher to manually flash the board. It’s based on esptool.py, but any ESP flasher should work. I haven’t used the ESP32 yet because the Wemos D1 Mini (8266) are so cheap I buy them by the dozen. (And there’s nothing new to learn.)
So open your Arduino IDE and flash blink.ino to verify that the boards are OK.
Thanks @stevemann . Ill try that approach is I cant use the ESPHome_Web. I’ve since read somewhere that I need to connect the ESP32 directly to the computer hosting ESPHome so i’ll perhaps try that approach first.
OK so I have made some progress. I found on another thread that using ESP tools heled someone and sure enough ESP tools found and configured one of my Superminis. All I had to do then was to adopt it into Home Assistant. Fortunately ESP Tools showed it had 4mb flash so not one of those described in Hackaday.
Just got to do the same with the second one now.
Since many, maybe most people run Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi on their desktop, this fits. My Home Assistant is running on an Intel NUC buried in my basement, so I have no access to a USB port.
Thankyou guys for all the suggestions.
For anyone finding this thread in the future. The problem I initially had was using the wrong COM port. I have an Asus NUC Pro as my main PC and that has an ITEEC Com port. I kept selecting that as the ESP32 com port instead of the USB JTAG/ Serial Debug port on COM 4. No wonder it kept failing
As someone in another thread pointed out, unplug any other USB/serial device from your PC before trying to flash your ESP32 to ensure you are using the correct COM port. Newbie Error on my part. That said ESP WebTools was my saviour and possibly for anyone else having similar issues flashing their devices.
Now onto setting up BLE presence detection.
