ESP32-C3 SoC USB flash / debug

[n0npr0phet]

Hi All,
I made this board, for a friend for his birthday, and I can't seem to get the USB working. I would like to be able to flash and JTAG debug it but nothing seems to work. I am using both idf.py CLI and also Visual Studio Code to try to flash but it never sees a COM port.

I haven't used USB with the this chip before. So it might just be that I don't have something right in the setup or flashing itself.

Do you see something glaringly wrong with the schematic that would prevent it from working?

Should I get a COM port using windows? I don't

Should I hold in the BOOT sw while pressing RESET or will it just show a COM port when it connects? I have tried all combinations.

I will do a little more testing tonight. Is there something I should try?



Thanks

[ESP_Sprite]

The schematics look good. You should get an USB port regardless of if you hold BOOT or not, but for the first program holding BOOT may be useful. If you don't see anything, well, perhaps your hardware is broken? I don't really see any issues in your schematic, but you could try the following:

- Is the 3.3V line stable?
- Is CHIP_EN indeed high in normal use?
- Do you have an oscilloscope? Can you measure if there's some 40MHz signal on the crystal pins?
- If so, can you check if there's serial chatter on U0TXD when you reset the board?

Btw, I'd remove C19 if I were you. It can lead to the board always booting up in download mode, which is probably not what you want when e.g. powering the board from a power bank.

[MicroController]

You may want to compare your circuit to e.g. https://github.com/01Space/ESP32-C3-0.4 ... ematic.pdf.

There could also be a driver issue on the PC side, i.e. Windows picking the wrong USB-serial driver and then failing to initialize/allocate the COM port. - I seem to remember that I once had to unplug my board and manually uninstall the USB-serial driver Windows selected and only then, upon re-connecting, I got the correct driver installed and the COM port worked. You also might want to try the Zadig tool, c.f. https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp ... ight=zadig

[n0npr0phet]

It was, indeed, a pc driver issue, I think. After @Microcontrollers reply I uninstalled IDF-ESP and reinstalled and it all works now. After reinstall I hear the USB ping and see both a COM port and USB JTAG in device manager. I was able to flash and run examples at the command prompt.
@ESP_Sprite thanks for your reply as well. I checked all the things you suggested with all good outcomes. Will remove C19 in future production runs.

I am still having issues using the Visual Studio Code Extension and so I have not been able to try JTAG debugging yet. I think it is something simple like a path or environmental variable. I tried installing it on a new PC, Installing Visual Studio Code getting the master branch, Running all the configuration steps but it still shows red underlines on my include statements and menuconfig errors out.

Thanks again! Great forum and folks!