IDE 2.0 is at the moment experimental, I would not do anything with it except see if something works. I would download and use the latest IDE version 1.
Have you tried to first uninstall the ESP32 core from the IDE 2.0 Board Manager?
You will find the installed ESP32 core at (assuming you are on Windows):
C:\Users\Your Name\AppData\Local\Arduino15\packages\esp32.
Maybe it will help if you delete the esp32 folder from there.
I hadn't tried to remove the esp32 core so have just tried it now .
After deleting the folder I restarted arduino 2.0 and it came up saying that the 1.0.6 library
that was in the deleted packages/esp32 folder needed to be reinstalled for the wrover to work
(Wrover was the currently selected board from last startup) it asked if I wanted to have 1.0.6 installed
but beforeI could reply it did as before saying that the json file in the preferences tab couldnt be loaded
so it seems that wasnt the problem , but thanks for trying.
I have a laptop with win10 that has never had arduino ide put on it so I shall try on there using the latest
stable arduino ide 1.8.19 as grumpy mike suggested , but its odd if its that because my first install that worked
and showed all the esp boards was on arduino 2.0
Hi Larry thanks for that however those are the instructions I have been following and are not working on this machine
this time. On the first install it worked fine. I have now tried a clean arduino install 1.8.19 on the laptop and that is running
esp32 fine it even has my esp32 wrover kit in the boards list .
So I shall again uninstall arduino from this desktop machine and try another go at installing with esp32
I may be wrong on this and some one will correct me.
As far as I know both IDE ver 1.xx and ver 2.0 access the same installed cores. You should therefor have the same current options available in IDE 2. Check what is available when you open ver 2.
Because I had it working before on my first install I guessed it was keeping something on my PC which prevented it
downloading the ESP board manager. Although I tried removing all references to Arduino from the registry It must have left something
so I bit the bullet and did a restore back to factory status . Then I installed Arduino and it downloaded the esp boards just fine
So for everyone that tried to help , Thank you it was appreciated
https://dl.espressif.com/dl/package_esp32_index.json was the old URL. As you noticed, they stopped maintaining the content of the file at that URL after they switched to the new URL, so the boards platform version available from the old URL is outdated and missing a lot of recent advancements.
Unfortunately there are still a lot of 3rd party tutorials, etc. that specify the old URL, so it is easy to get stuck with the outdated 1.0.6 version of the platform instead of the modern version (currently 2.0.4)
Hi ptillisch
Thanks for your reply, I didnt know that the https://dl.espressif.com/dl/package_esp32_index.json was out of date but I actually removed that from the Preferences and used the correct address which it then refused to connect to. I can only assume my PC had stored details of the out of date address somewhere even though I tried removing from the registry. But once I reinstalled windows it obviously cleared everything and so the new address went in first go. So the good thing is its all working fine now, I just wished I had known sooner so I didnt have to reinstall windows and all my programs that were installed in it