Continuing the discussion from Best Method for Utilizing On-Board Flash?:
This is an old thread, but if anyone has figured out the answer I've been searching for ever for it myself. I just can't figure out how to flash WLED to my nano esp32. I have gotten it to flash with a custom bin compiled on github. but it doesn't let me save my settings, so with each power cycle I'm back to the initial settings. I suspect it's something to do with this onboard flash issue mentioned here. I am no computer programmer by any means and have tried flashing WLED every way possible only successful with flashtool, and it seems odd the way it worked, I erase and my port charges so I change the port and flash my bin. I've tried every different combination I could think of and that's the only successful flash I can get. I do get a file system 19 error on the PC interface, what ever that is. highly suspect it's something with me flashing to the wrong place and not the onboard flash, I have no idea.
I finally figured this out, I've been Fighting it for awhile now, and no matter how much i google I haven't found an answer, well I stumbled across it. when you click info down towards the bottom it'll read 0kb, of some memory acronym used. I wasn't writing into memory with my settings. so I went back to ide and choose my board "nano esp 32" under tools I selected esp tool for my programmer and above that a line or two or three there's a memory setting one option is labeled default and the other advanced, click advanced. I also changed changed something about tiny USB instead of hardware that's default. then I simply uploaded a bare minimum sketch to my board, then went back to my flash download tool and flashed my compiled wled bin, it fails the first time and the port changes, I don't know what's going on there but it doesn't matter, I select the new port number and flash again and presto it flashes wled, and now it saves settings to memory, that zero is now a number under info and all is good. I replicated this process with two more nano esp32s and a heltec wifi kit v3 all of which were successful. I don't know what I'm doing but persistence always prevails. I've come across a hundred people having this issue and there's never the answer, I hope this helps some people out