ESP32 Novice - where to begin - need help

[stain35]

Just purchased Seamuing ESP32 Module OLED Display WiFi Development Board

I want to use this attached to a Raspberry Pi 4 that has Home Assistant installed. It will hopefully be used to communicate with and control devices in my home network.

For anyone who knows Home Assistant, I added ESPHome addon and followed some basic instructions to set up. The immediate issue I had was that, even when connected to my Raspberry Pi4, it was not recognised as a ESP32 device.

So I went the root of using Arduino following a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZskFhma8atc to set things up. I came unstuck quickly as thie Seamuing did not appear on the list of board managers. I realise that it may be that my Seamuing already is configured to be used butt I am at a loss as to what I need to do.

When connected, the led display on it does identify networks, including mine, so I thought I might ned to connect it to the wifi network first. However, using my laptop usb port this time, instead of the raspberry pi port, I connected it to the laptop but instructions to serially connect have failed too as Puttty did not seem to recognise any COM port (that itself was not easily identified but I think I got it).

If I can get the Arduino connection, I may have a chance with setting it up but at the moment, I really have no clue how to proceed.

[ESP_Sprite]

Silly question, but you wouldn't be the first getting caught up in it: are you sure that the USB cable you used has data lines as well, as in, that it's not a charging-only cable?

[stain35]

I am going to play safe and get a new data cable. My other option was to unplug other usbs such as my Conbee and use that lead temporarily. However, no point in messing around with settings and where usb devices are recorded as connected in my system, as this may mess up other things. I will have the new lead tomorrow and will report the results.

[stain35]

yep.... schoolboy error..... thought it was a data cable but it was not.

So fitted a correct cable and after an awful lot of issues and misunderstandings on my part (missing drivers to find, uncertainty about the board type, false starts using Visual Studio instead of Arduino), I seem to be getting there. A few more things to do though. Thanks.

[ESP_Sprite]

No worries, happens to the best of us (although less often to me, now I've developed a habit to cut into pieces any of my non-data cables I come across). Good luck with the rest of your journey!