Flashing ESP32 DevKitC without jtag debugger?

[parsec67]

I don’t have a jtag debugger for this device and not sure if I really need one atm.  Is it at all possible to flash the .bin file built with MSBuild using the ESP Flash download tool?

[support]

Hi,

The .bin file produced by MSBuild won’t be helpful, however you can use the esptool.py tool to program the ELF file (usually same name as the .bin file and no extension). To get the exact esptool.py arguments for programming the file, please try programming any project built with the command-line ESP-IDF tools and check the build/programming log.

[parsec67]

Thanks, yes with esptool.py it looks straightforward, first convert elf to bin, then flash

python esptool.py --chip esp32 elf2image myapp_esp32

python esptool.py --chip esp32 --port COM7 --baud 115200 --before default_reset --after hard_reset write_flash -z --flash_mode dio --flash_freq 40m --flash_size detect 0x10000 myapp_esp32.bin

This works directly under Windows Python 2.7 after installing pyserial so no dependence on the Espressif’s msys2 distribution.

I would have preferred a built-in automated way of flashing via USB directly after build, is this something that could be added in future releases?

[support]

Hi,

Yes, we will support this out-of-the-box once the ESP32 gdb stub supports full debugging (so VisualGDB will be able to provide complete debugging experience without JTAG).

[Author]

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