Hi guys, I have 2 ESP32 dev boards and I am forced to hold down the Boot button each time I need to upload new code. I found this website claiming to have a solution, I did the steps but it kinda worked, sometimes the ESP32 would send gibberish into the terminal and won't start running my code until restarted multiple times. Should use another type of capacitor? My background is software, not electronics so please be nice.
**TL;DR = Avoid the need of holding down boot while uploading code. ** 10 uF electrolytic capacitor
When I hook an ESP32 to my PC, I use a powered USB hub to protect the PC from damage in case I frack up the ESP32; did that once already. Since doing the powered USB hub thing, I do not have to press the button on developer modules to get the upload program thingy show to do.
Just got my first 2 ESP32s last week. Had a similar issue. I tried pullup and pulldown methods on boot pins as described elsewhere and also tried the capacitor on the EN pin ... nothing worked reliably, so I unplugged the ESP32 from the breadboard and powered it directly from the PC's USB port with the only connection being the USB cable. This worked great!
Still, I ended up using a powered USB hub and highly recommend this for the reasons described by Idahowalker. Trying to find a high quality breadboard at the moment but don't know of any yet. The boot problem made me wonder if some of the boot pins were affected by the "antennae" created by the breadboard pin rails.
If you need an Arduino compatible analogWrite() function for the ESP32, I created one that works with 9 channels + the 2 DAC pins and added it to the QuickPID library. There's a description and example at the bottom of the page. You could copy / paste to grab the relevant code or just install the library to get analogWrite() working.
