I've 150 ESP32S3 Feathers for my students, but they're unreliable to flash (in C++ on Windows)

[hamish]

Morning!

I buy a couple of hundred ESP32 Feathers each year to teach a course in my University. We're moving to the S3 this year (2MB PSRAM version). They work on Linux, but we teach in a Windows lab, where they are very difficult to flash reliably.

There have been around 5 similar posts reporting the problem on the Feather forum, but few posts from Adafruit and none that have helped so far :( My own summary of the issues is here.

I'm worried that my students will find the boards too hard to work with :(

Can Adafruit take a look? Perhaps we need a non-UF2 bootloader to support these boards for C++/Arduino use? Or a change to the boards.txt configuration?

Thanks!
Hamish Cunningham

PS please don't say "try pressing boot and then reset" :) Myself and the 10 or so other people who have been discussing this on the other forum have tried a lot of the obvious fixes! Tnx!

[mikeysklar]

Thank for the summary Hamish. I will request engineering to comment.

[adafruit2]

yeah its not hardware, its something with the board support package. we have to figure out what changed, and lunar new year delayed stuff. meanwhile you can select "ESP32-S3 Dev Board" (generic board) to get going.

[adafruit2]

we're still investigating this, can follow this thread
viewtopic.php?p=959702#p959702

[hamish]

Tnx; I can flash (on Linux) with the generic devkit board and if I "manually" supply the correct feather pindefs I can do simple stuff, but I don't get anything on Serial for some reason.

Will keep watching :)