Thank you for your super-quick reply ESP_Sprite, that's exactly what I wanted to know, I'll try that out. BTW for anybody else who might end up here while trying this rather unusual procedure: the symptom of this problem is that when attempting to flash, the operation fails with the well-known "Time...

I'm working with a DevKitC board, but I would like to avoid using its USB/UART chip and instead use a separate FTDI-based USB/UART cable. The reason is that I currently have an issue with the Silabs USB kernel extension/driver on my Mac so I can't use that part of the board. Until I have that sorted...