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Comment by doug_life | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any more information on this? It would be great to get this running in PlatformIO

Not much to be said, it should "just work" out of the box. You plug a board in (for example this one https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2566.html, I've seen it in a bunch of online stores in Europe), and it should give you a COM port on Windows, a `/dev/cu.usbmodem...` device on macOS, and something similar on Linux. Then all the usual tools should work as normal, at least the ones that come with ESP-IDF.

On the chip or the modules, this is pins GPIO18 and GPIO19 that just need to be directly connected to USB D- and D+. Of course the chip still needs between 3.0V and 3.6V for power, so you can't power it from USB directly. If the firmware is just rebooting all the time (sometimes the case on a fresh module), you may need to pull GPIO9 low to enter bootloader instead (https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esptool/en/latest/esp32c..., there is a button for this on some boards), but otherwise you can just flash it in normal mode too.

Oh, so this isn’t full in circuit debugging like ESP-PROG would enable, correct? These parts just have built in USB-Serial for programming and printing to the terminal without an external IC.

Edit: Never mind, it does appear to allow full in circuit debugging. I’ll have to do some more research.

As far as debugging goes, you basically need to run `idf.py openocd` to start OpenOCD, and then connect to it with the gdb that's part of the ESP-IDF SDK, by default it should be listening on port 3333. At least that's how I have it set up in CLion.

There is more info here https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/v5.0/esp32c3/..., the ESP-IDF VS Code extension should have this doable with one button click.

Yep. It literally made our ESP-PROG connection obsolete, and gave us back all the pins we burned on our board for JTAG.

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