DevelopmentTips.md

🎥 Magic Pocket Control for ESP32 devices

Blackmagic Design camera control on a LILYGO T-Display-S3, M5Stack M5StickC Plus, Freenove ESP32-S3-WROOM, or (hopefully) any other ESP32 device.

Development and Device Tips

Development Tips

Device Tips

🧱 Bricked! Or just can't deploy a build.

Despite unplugging power and deploying a thousand times, I'm yet to actually brick one of the ESP32s. That's not to say you aren't fully capable of doing that or your devices do stop working for good!

Here are some tips if you can't deploy a build to your device.

"Error: Unknown board ID 'm5stack_cores3'" (or other)

This means that the espressif32 platform is not up to date, see the last post here on how to open a CLI in platformio (from VSCode) and run the command.

Open PlatformIO forum post

Run this command in the CLI:

pio pkg update -g -p espressif32

M5Stack CoreS3

If you are having trouble deploying/flashing your M5Stack CoreS3 you can try M5Stack's M5Burner software and flash one of their images to the device (e.g. UIFlow2.0). M5Burner is available here.

If it successfully deploys their image, and it's running on the device, then try again to deploy your code to it through Visual Studio Code.

M5Stack CoreS3 - Uploading firmware

Due to the M5Stack CoreS3 needing to be manually put into boot loader mode you may not be able to load firmware on it if it's not in that mode when you connect it to your computer.

To put it into this mode, hold down the Reset button (the one to the right of the microSD card slot) before plugging it into your PC, then release it once plugged in.

Watch this video at the bottom of this page to see how it's done.

Still having issues with the CoreS3, see this YouTube video where he has issues trying to burn firmware.

LILYGO T-Display-S3, Freenove ESP32-S3-WROOM, and probably most ESP32 devices

If I've been developing for a while on these devices, regularly deploying builds to it, they can start to become less welcoming for a new build. (Once I left the T-Display-S3 on overnight and had to follow the below steps a number of times to revive it - useful to get these screenshots!)

Sometimes you'll try to deploy and it can't find the device or stops while writing partway with messages like "The chipped stopped responding" (that may look like this).

Then here are the steps I take to get it responsive to another deployment:

1. Unplug the USB-C cable and then plug it back in, try and deploy a build. If it doesn't work, continue to next step
2. Open Arduino IDE and follow the next steps

4. Re-select the board (Note: It may have identified it's a different device):

   • Click on the device drop-down at the top

   • Click on the relevant COM port, changing to the that COM port

   • Menu: Tools > Board: > esp32 > "LilyGo T-Display-S3"

   • Paste the following code into the editor and hit "Upload"

     #define PIN_LCD_BL 38 
     #define PIN_POWER_ON 15
     
     // the setup function runs once when you press reset or power the board
     void setup() {
       Serial.begin(115200);
     }
     
     void loop() {
       Serial.print("->"); // prints characters so we can see, in the terminal, it's working
       delay(1000); // wait for a second
     }
     

   • The above tries to deploy a simple program that prints a serial arrow every 1 second.

   • If it doesn't upload correctly, try a few more times. Unplug and replug the device if necessary.

- If you still can't upload, unplug the USB-C, hold down the boot button and, while doing so, plug the USB-C cable back in, release the boot button after a few seconds.
- If you've come this far and it's still not working, you may need to resort to using Espressif's Python scripts to flash the device, see the next section.
- Additionally, try to reboot your computer (this has worked for me a number of times) and try again
- Once you've successfully uploaded it, go back to Visual Studio Code and start the Serial Monitor

  $\color{green}{\textsf{Success}}$

Can't Upload in Arduino IDE

- If you see the serial messages "->->->"... coming through then you should be right to deploy a build to it (Note: Don't run Arduino IDE's Serial Monitor as it will block Visual Studio's one)

  $\color{green}{\textsf{Unbricked!}}$
  ![Unbricked!](Documents/DevTips_TDS3_VSCUploadSuccess.jpg)

- If you've got here and it's still not working, I'm out of advice - except, unplug it, give it some time, reboot, try the Espressif approach below, and the above a few times. Athough I haven't bricked a device yet, it has taken a number of iterations at times. The best of luck!

Using Espressif's Python esptool to flash the device (Windows, I assume similar option for other OS's):

1. Ensure you have Python 3 on your computer (I use Anaconda and Anaconda Prompt)
2. Install as per Espressif docs
3. Plug your device in with the USB-C cable
4. In Anaconda Prompt run

python -m esptool write_flash_status --bytes 3 --non-volatile 0

5. You should see something like this:

6. Return to the steps regarding flashing the simple program through Arduino IDE