Firmware upload and boot/reset buttons
Hello!
I recently bought a couple of Elecrow ESP32 display devices, and I'm having some issues uploading a firmware image onto them. I have both an ESP Terminal and an ESP32 with 5-inch display, and both seem to behave the same way.
To upload a firmware image to the board, the wiki says to:
Hold down the Boot button and press the RESET button to initiate firmware download mode
This manually puts the board in "Firmware Download Mode", but it's very impractical to have to do this every single time I make a small change to my code. On the ESP Terminal the buttons are very close together in a recessed slot and having to do this for every small code change makes it much more difficult to use than other similar products (e.g. WT32-SC01 or WT32-SC01 Plus).
How can I use this hardware like almost all other ESP32 boards, where you can just press "Upload sketch" in Arduino IDE or "Upload and monitor" in PlatformIO or esptool.py write_flash, and it immediately uploads it?
From what I understand, for this to happen the board would need to have the DTR and RTS pins of the USB-to-serial converter to be connected to the ESP32's EN and GPIO0 pins respectively, but I don't see this on the schematic linked at the bottom of the product page. I see EN connected to the FT6236's reset pin, but not to DTR, and I don't see anything connected to RTS. This makes me wonder if it's even possible with this hardware…
I'd be very grateful if someone here knew of a way to achieve this. I contacted Elecrow's techsupport@… email about it but haven't heard anything back.
Comments
This might just turn into one of those
this is the waysituations since it could be by design. However, you might find your solution here: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esptool/en/latest/esp32s3/advanced-topics/boot-mode-selection.html#Hello @nff ,
We are sorry because we designed the host computer in the initial design, we encountered some communication problems between the host computer and the board, which led us to abandon the function of automatically entering the burning mode.
According to the feedback collected from customers, we deeply understand that the design of manually pressing the button to enter the burning mode is very unreasonable. Therefore, in the latest version of the hardware design, we have added modifications to this issue.
Unfortunately, the old version of the screen still seems to have to enter the boot mode manually.
How do we know if we the newest hardware? I just bought a 7" display this weekend and have to push the buttons to burn.