I bought an ESP32-WROOM-32 board few days back. I have been trying to connect the board to my computer to perform some testing.
I was following this tutorial and have checked a few more, there is a red light that lights up when the ESP is connected to the computer. However, on my end, no red light lights up. Instead, a blue light lights up and keeps on blinking.
The board itself isn't being recognised by my computer. I have installed the necessary drivers and followed the tutorial as it is. Is my board faulty? I want to make sure if there is a problem with my board or not before I go buy a second one.
I have inspected the board myself and I don't see any abnormalities on it, eg burnt marks.
Sounds like a blink sketch is loaded on your ESP and it's successfully flashing the onboard LED. Most onboard LEDs on ESP32 modules are blue.
You may be using a USB cable that only supplies power to the board but does not allow data transfer (i.e. a "charging cable"). Try connecting your phone to your computer with the same cable; does your computer detect the phone as a device? Or does the phone simply start charging its battery?
I don't have a phone that accepts micro-USB connector (ESP32 works with micro-USB cable). I am thinking to cycle through a few cables and share the progress afterwards. Thank you for your input.
Yeah, try a couple of cables. Or find a micro-USB device that you can test your cables with. There still are some around.
The downside of testing cables at random is that you may end up realizing that you don't have any data cables in the house, so none of them work. You could purchase a couple of cables that are explicitly intended for data transfer. They're cheap.
You were right. It was a cable problem. Thank you so much. I am amazed the guys who I purchased the ESP32 from didnt know which cable works with this chip.
I actually had a few cables lying around from my old phones. I just had to find them and check if they still worked. One of the cables worked.