Production flashing

[drifkind]

I had thought we were ready to put an ESP32-C3 widget into production. Somehow I assumed that programming the finished boards was a detail, and once we’d figured out encryption and secure boot I was done. That’s looking like a mistake.

Is there nothing like a one-button flashing device, like a PICkit4 for PICs and ATSAMs, or similar third party things for most other ARM MCUs? Our usual source claims to be working on one for the C3, but (a) not ready, and (b) I think it’s going to be UART-based, and I went all-in on the USB bridge interface.

Is the Windows tool worth trying to work with? It seems so ragged even if we figured out how to configure it—our setup isn’t quite normal—it would probably explode at some critical point. And, this isn’t an IoT device. We can’t rely on OTA and have to program in batches, so it’s no good giving the fab house pre-programmed chips.

[ESP_Sprite]

What are your requirements exactly? The USB tool is used in production from what I know, so it possibly does what you want. An alternative would be to take the esptool.py program and roll your own infrastructure around it, if you need a more specialized setup.