Hi All,
I gave a talk and demo last week about microcontroller programming centered around the ESP32. We gave ~ 20 non-hardware programmers a SparkFun ESP32 Thing and had them walk through the process of setting up the ESP-IDF, writing and flashing code. Here's a repo with the installation instructions, troubleshooting, and very simple examples we used. There's also a link there to the talk.
https://github.com/cmason1978/esp32-examples
We had a lot of trouble with USB serial drivers. Everyone was on mac, but older mac versions (~10.9?) had weird failures during flashing: make monitor could connect, but we got Timed out waiting for packet header every time we tried to flash. Upgrading the FTDI drivers solved it, but it took a while to figure this out.
In any event, I thought this might be useful to others.
Best,
-c