Changes

While the device enumerates as with USB connected and has the capacity to facilitate serial communications, it is not really feasible with the constant reboot cycle. There are two slight variations of the board, the ones with a populated micro SD slot mostly have this issue, and the others do not. However connecting to the <code>TXD0</code> pin to the <code>Rx</code> of a USB/Serial UART converter the following can be captured. Additionally holding the ESP32 in reset and monitoring the UART you can capture the following by briefly releasing the reset and then re-enabling reset, othrewise otherwise you will get a continuous flood of the same messages at <code>115200 baud</code>.

Further experimentation is indicating it may be related to a fault in the thru-hole GPI0 as directly shorting <code>GPIO0</code> (Pin 27) to ground can result in the following.<pre>ESP-ROM:esp32s3-20210327Build:Mar 27 2021rst:0x1 (POWERON),boot:0x36 (SPI_DOWNLOAD_BOOT)wait spi downloadESP-ROM:esp32s3-20210327Build:Mar 27 2021rst:0x15 (USB_UART_CHIP_RESET),boot:0x36 (SPI_DOWNLOAD_BOOT)Saved PC:0x400507aewait spi download</pre> Attempting to use <code>esptool.py</code> generates a <code>Connecting...</code> message and then the serial output generates and updated message.<pre>ESP-ROM:esp32s3-20210327Build:Mar 27 2021rst:0x15 (USB_UART_CHIP_RESET),boot:0x36 (SPI_DOWNLOAD_BOOT)Saved PC:0x400507aewait spi download</pre> However this seems to hang the USB connection and nothing further happens until it times out. Some of the boards do properly enter "Boot Mode" which is done by connected connecting <code>GPIO0</code> to ground. This can easily be done by using a jumper wire from a through hole header that exposes both <code>GPIO0</code> and ground and pressing a reset button immediately below it. Alternatively this can be achieved by using a wired to wire pressed to the bottom right most module pin and the metal RF shield on top of the module while connecting to USB to power on.

There's various ways you can now access the device, including over WiFi once configured. I highly recommend <code>rshell</code> which provides the ability to copy and move files as well as directly write and debug code using REPL. If you don't pass any arguments it will automatically attempt to connect, if you have multiple devices you can also specify the connection parameters. Here the built in USB/Serial interface is connected via <code>D+/D-</code> is being usedpins.