ESP32 Forum

I'm pretty new at this, so this is probably a dumb question.

I'm designing my first non-trivial PCB with an ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 (n8r8) on it. I know that with my devkit I use the non-UART USB connection for flashing and monitoring.

From what I can find, it seems like I can design a PCB without any uart bridge, and the only caveat seems to be that the first flash has to be done via using a BOOT + RESET button in order to get it into the right mode. After that idf.py can flash and monitor perfectly fine, is that correct?

Is there any downside to not using the uart bridge?

KallDrexx wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 01, 2023 8:22 pm

From what I can find, it seems like I can design a PCB without any uart bridge, and the only caveat seems to be that the first flash has to be done via using a BOOT + RESET button in order to get it into the right mode. After that idf.py can flash and monitor perfectly fine, is that correct?

Is there any downside to not using the uart bridge?

That should be correct.
One more downside may be that the USB peripheral shuts down in sleep mode, which disconnects the virtual COM port on my Windows machine until the ESP is reset. If your application goes to sleep shortly after boot you may have to press BOOT+RESET more often than is convenient and monitoring over USB won't be too usable.

Excellent thanks!

That's good to know about the sleep thing. Luckily that's not a big deal for my use case, since it probably won't be sleeping much.

FWIW, in all my designs using the ESP32-S3 USB interface pins I dont have to use BOOT + RESET to get it into programming mode.
It works the same as if using the serial interface.