Help needed, Geekcreit ESP32 prints garbage

[butchalline]

My setup: Arduino IDE 1.8,12, Win10 64bit

I have two Geekcreit ESP32 dev boards purchased from Banggood. There are no docs. Only ID on board is "2024"

First problem was booting, which was fixed with 10uF cap from EN to gnd.

Second problem was printing 'hello world" to serial monitor. All I get is garbage after pressing the EN button.

Tried different boards, baud rates, board params with no joy

Any and all help appreciated.

If I have to re-flash, what is the easiest way to do this?

[ns1668]

You get garbage when they boot, so they are transmitting something.
Are you using idf.py to monitor it?

[butchalline]

Sorry, but I do not know what "idf.py" is or how it is used.

At 115200 baud (in the sketch and monitor), what I am getting is strange characters like:
%⸮FE⸮e%JJj⸮+⸮ѥ⸮⸮A
or:
rst:0x1 (POWERON_RESET),boot:0x0 (DOWNLOAD_BOOT(UART0/UART1/SDIO_FEI_FEO_V2))
waiting for download

At 9600 baud, I get ⸮@t⸮⸮⸮⸮$dPT⸮⸮T.⸮⸮ @T@(

I never see anything close to hello world

Thanks for your help and I would appreciate any further suggestions.

[butchalline]

Update:
All of the above tests were conducted on a protoboard.
Then I soldered the capacitor (same as the one in the original tests) from EN to GND and all worked fine on both boards and at all baud rates.

Bottom line:
1. Buy boards with the capacitor built in - good luck with that!
2. Never fully trust a proto board. Wiggle everything.
3. Never give up. There be dragons and Murphy everywhere

p.s. If anyone knows where to buy boards with capacitors built in, please post them here...

CASE CLOSED !