ESP32-C3 Mini C1166 not detected on Linux but another ESP32-C3 works

Official Hardware Nano Family Nano ESP32
1

Hi,

I have two ESP32-C3 Mini boards. One of them works perfectly on my Linux PC, but the other one is not detected at all.

Working board: ESP32-C3 Mini HW-4694
Not detected board: ESP32-C3 Mini C1166

When I plug the working one, it shows up normally as a serial device, but the C1166 board does not appear.

Does anyone know why this could happen or if these boards use different USB chips?

Thanks.

2

Linux usually does not care about the chips. I do not have the board so this is a SWAG: It appears you may have a bad board, does it do anything when powered up? Does the power led light if there is one?

3

have you tried to:

  • connect the “undetected board”
  • press and hold the “boot” button down
  • press and release the “reset” button
  • release the “boot” button

?

some boards need this to connect to USB

4

Yes, the red LED turns on when I plug it in, so it is getting power. However, it is not detected at all by my Linux PC (no serial device appears).

5

Yes, I already tried that.

I actually had the same issue before with another board, and using the boot + reset method fixed it. But in this case it still doesn’t get detected on my PC even after doing that.

6

Check if it shows up in /dev, sorted by time. Before plugging in

$ ls -lt /dev | head
total 0
crw-rw-rw-  1 root tty         5,     2 Mar  6 21:39 ptmx
drwxrwxrwt  2 root root              40 Mar  6 21:39 shm
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root            4920 Mar  6 21:38 char
crw-------  1 root root      239,     0 Mar  6 21:38 hidraw0
crw-------  1 root root      239,     1 Mar  6 21:38 hidraw1

and then right after

$ ls -lt /dev | head
total 0
crw-rw-rw-  1 root tty         5,     2 Mar  6 21:40 ptmx
drwxrwxrwt  2 root root              40 Mar  6 21:40 shm
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root            4960 Mar  6 21:40 char
drwxr-xr-x  4 root root              80 Mar  6 21:40 serial
crw-rw----  1 root dialout   166,     0 Mar  6 21:40 ttyACM0
crw-------  1 root root      239,     0 Mar  6 21:38 hidraw0

Notice ttyACM0, part of the dialout group