I finally got it to work, but it's not a hardware issue. Something was not configured right in the ESP-IDF plugin. I ended up uninstalling ESP-IDF, uninstalling VS Code and removing all traces of it from the hard drive (installed plugins, etc.) - and then reinstalling again. Also had some trouble re...

It shouldn't matter. I still think it's odd that the 'do not use stub' thing does not propagate... can you clean your project ('esp-idf fullclean' or simply delete the build directory) and try again? I deleted the build directory, then checked build/config/sdkconfig.h, and this line is there: #defi...

When development kit is configured with USB-to-serial bridge, output is as follows: esptool.py v3.1-dev Serial port COM8 Connecting.... Chip is unknown ESP32-C3 (revision 3) Features: Wi-Fi Crystal is 40MHz MAC: 7c:df:a1:61:f0:30 Uploading stub... Running stub... Stub running... Changing baud rate t...

In the esp-idf configuration (Menuconfig, not sure what VS calls it), under 'serial flasher config', can you enable 'Disable download stub', see if that works? I tried that, but it didn't fix the problem - same behavior, hangs at "Running stub...": esptool.py v3.1-dev Serial port COM9 Connecting......

Yes. (Unless you have an app in flash that reconfigures GPIO18 or GPIO19. In that case, you want to tie GPIO9 low when you reset the chip to force the chip into bootloader mode so you can overwrite that app) I'm facing the same issue. Using a ESP32-C3-MINI devkit, I was able to download and debug m...