Digikey MKR-KIT Development Card

[Widgetman]

Hi All,
I am trying to get a development card working which supports the ESP32 on it along with a Micro Fusion FPGA. I am using the Arduino compiler since I am familiar with it. I have all of the Python support drivers installed, and can compile an example with no errors. When I try to program the ESP32 I get a timeout waiting for header packet. This seems to be a common issue with this part. The part is running some sample code previously installed in it when I got it. It constantly scans the wifi network, and sees my local network just fine. I suspect the EN and IO-0 lines are not being toggled correctly. I have am not quite sure how to get this device in boot mode so the compiler can download a new example. Can someone please explain the exact sequence these lines should be in to enable boot mode, and if they have successfully gotten this module to work with the Arduino compiler. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks
Tom

[Widgetman]

Hi,
I finally found the issues and a work around. The current design of the Digikey MKT-KIT board attempts to use RTS and DTR as control lines for boot mode. They fed the Emitter of the RTS Transistor back around to the base of DTR and vise versa. This does not seem to meet the requirements of the ESP32 Boot mode timing which results in the timeout of the module. The chicken and the egg comes to mind. I manually attached a wire from pin 1 on Sw3 to pin 2 on J10. this allowed me to manually hold the button down on SW3 while I powered up the module which allowed the module to enter boot mode. I could then download code to the module and run it. This is a hack fix but it works. I would suggest push buttons on the control lines in the future should Digikey decide to respin the card.

[ESP_Angus]

I hadn't heard of the MKR-KIT before, but it looks like it uses the Adafruit HUZZAH32 as its included development board. Is that right?
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-huz ... r/overview

Some early development boards had problems like this on some OSes which were improved by increasing capacitance between EN pin and GND, to extend the reset pulse slightly. Recent Espressif dev boards have this change (I think a 2.2uF capacitor is used). You could try making this modification on the Adafruit board, see if automatic flashing works.

[Widgetman]

Here is the link to the MKR Development kit which supports both the 8266 and ESP32 modules

https://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=MKR-KIT