I have been battling this issue for weeks and am making no progress. I am stuck. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I am not new to programming, micros, circuit design, PCB design, soldering, etc. but I am new to the ESP32. I have a DEV board and I used it to prototype up a project that may be a product at some point. The project uses an IMU, OLED display, Bluetooth, WiFi, on-board battery, battery management and charger. Everything works great using the DEV board programmed through the USB port.
I then designed a PCB using the ESP32-WROOM-32E. I am using an external programmer as there is no USB-TTL device on-board. This version does have EN and BOOT buttons but I hope that the final version will not have them. My first attempts to upload the code did not work. Then, for some reason, I was able to upload the code to one of the two boards I have built up so far. Since then, nothing.
I have seen every post ever made on the issue with getting the ESP32 into boot mode. That is not the issue. With the COM window open, I can communicate with the ESP32. When I press the EN button, I get the reset traffic over the COM port. If I press EN and BOOT and then let up EN, I get the message that the ESP32 is in boot mode and ready to receive code. When I initiate the upload through the IDE, nothing.
So there is no issue with communicating from the ESP32 to the IDE. There is also no issue getting the ESP32 into boot mode. The IDE doesn't seem to acknowledge that the ESP32 is in boot mode and the transfer never takes place.
I'm stuck. Not sure what else to try.
(Oh. I use Visual Studio (not VSCode) as the IDE with the VisualMicro plug in but it doesn't matter. I can't get anything to go with the Arduino IDE either.)
Thanks for any help.