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Comment by girvo | Hacker News Reader

It's genuinely interesting that he says that the USB flashing can't be relied on: we've been using the S3 at work for... gosh, 12 months? Longer? And it's been perfectly reliable for us -- and that's despite us flashing it via OpenOCD inside a Docker container, inside WSL2 with usbipd!

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Espressif dev here. I usually advise people to break out GPIO0 (or GPIO9 for the ESP32Cx series) because 1. if you somehow write firmware that reconfigures the USB pins, there's no way to get the USB connection going via which you can reset the ESP into download mode, and 2. if somehow a firmware upload aborts halfway, the ESP32 can go into a bootloop with the USB device periodically disappearing. In the 2nd scenario, it's not impossible to time your flash so it goes through, but simply pulling GPIO0 low is easier. I don't think having an actual button is needed, but I'd certainly have a test point or another way you can ground that pin when you get yourself in a pickle.

Oh, we absolutely have on our boards. It's just we've had to use it to recover from a borked flash maybe twice, total? We don't have a button, just have to bridge some pads.

.... literally how?

ESP-IDF devcontainer + vscode and the ESP-IDF plugin? Maybe it's worth me seeing if work will let me publish our docs around it, but it was pretty much as simple as following the ESP-IDF plugin's own documentation:

https://github.com/espressif/vscode-esp-idf-extension/blob/m...

The Rube-Goldbergy-ness of it all still makes me upset, but hey it works, and surprisingly well. Including JTAG debugging and all, too.

I’m using an s3 with esphome which uses platformio which uses esp-idf and it usb flashes fine too.

I'm interested in what other people are doing with esphome. I am using pretty cheap 8266es to do distributed sensing around the house, but what are you doing that requires the S3? It was my impression that it was decently more expensive?

Nothing in particular that requires an S3. I’m just running a Bluetooth proxy for home assistant, which can run on a basic esp32.

The one thing the S3 has that others don't is the LX7 micro, and it's vector extensions. This can be used to speed up computer vision tasks if you're using presence detection... but really theres better choices for that haha

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