ESP32 Forum

Hi All,

I'm new to these little gadgets and often out of my depth but managed to make some great IoT projects so far! ESP32 and Arduino IDE 1.8.9. - I had exclusively used the IDE to upload and had no problems. Recently I used an app that I coded as lazily as possible on an ESP32, basically it wrote and retrieved 6 or 7 ints to NVM every time through loop (which was unnecessary but I wanted to see how it'd work before i rewrote it to only write and retrieve when necessary). It worked for a few weeks and then lost connection constantly. I figured I just abused NVM too much, so I figured let's start fresh. I used the ESP Flash Download tool to do a clean erase of the board. Ever since, I can't get anything uploaded from the IDE (see below). Did I erase some bin file that came pre-installed to play nice with Arduino? How do I get my new code on this board! Greatly appreciate any help at all.

If you did indeed abuse the NVS too much, it could be that you 'burned a hole' in your flash chip: each sector only has a limited amount of times it can be erased and re-written, and while NVS does try to use the sectors allocated to it as fairly as possible, if you have a small NVS partition and lots and lots of writes, you can still wear out a sector. If a sector is worn out, there is no fixing it: it can't be properly erased anymore and erasing the flash will probably fail. In other words: sorry, your flash chip is more-or-less dead.

If my flash chip was actually fried, I would think I would have more problems, when I reset it it boots right up and recalls the numbers it had stored, or at least it did right before i used the erase tool. If I left it running for another two weeks it would have disconnected again, but i would expect physical damage to that degree to prevent it from booting on reset. I'm fairly certain i erased a bootloader or some other necessary thing by flashing, i reflashed the same firmware (in IDE) right before I did the erase and it worked perfectly, I did the erase and now I get the message above. I've only worked in IDE so I have no idea what i'm doing with these ESP32 tools. I do think it's odd that it gets to "writing 100%" before throwing an error, too

Try a different USB cable. Set the upload speed to 115200, then try setting flash mode to DIO @ 40MHz.