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DroneBridge / ESP32

DroneBridge for ESP32. A secure & transparent telemetry link with support for WiFi and ESP-NOW. Supporting MAVLink, MSP, LTM or any other protocol
Apache License 2.0
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Include flashing instructions for C3 in release notes #55

Closed george-hawkins closed 4 months ago

george-hawkins commented 5 months ago

Thanks for all your hard work on DroneBridge/ESP32. It's great that C3 is now supported and a .zip for it is now included in releases.

I'd suggest including flash instructions for the C3 in the release notes, otherwise people may assume the given esptool.py command will work for both the classic ESP32 and the C3. I know you've included flash_args.txt in the .zip files but I'm not sure people will notice it.

Maybe a quick start section like this, in the release notes, would be useful:

Quick start

Install the Espressif tool esptool.py first (you'll need Python 3.7 or newer). Connect your ESP32 or C3 board and always first erase its flash:

$ esptool.py -p (PORT) erase_flash

Then extract the .zip file for your board (DroneBridge_vX_Y_ESP32.zip for a classic ESP32 board or DroneBridge_vX_Y_ESP32C3.zip for a C3 board) and then flash the contained .bin files to your board.

For a classic ESP32 board, the flash command is:

$ esptool.py -p (PORT) -b 460800 --before default_reset --after hard_reset  write_flash --flash_mode dio --flash_size detect --flash_freq 40m 0x1000 bootloader.bin 0x8000 partition-table.bin 0x10000 db_esp32.bin 0x110000 www.bin

For a C3 board, the command is:

$ esptool.py -p (PORT) -b 460800 --before default_reset --after hard_reset --chip esp32c3  write_flash --flash_mode dio --flash_size 2MB --flash_freq 80m 0x0 bootloader.bin 0x8000 partition-table.bin 0x10000 db_esp32.bin 0x110000 www.bin

Then connect your laptop or phone to the DroneBridge ESP32 WiFi access point and open the link http://192.168.2.1/ in a browser (depending on your setup, the easier to remember URL http://dronebridge.local/ may also work).

Users report varying degrees of success accessing these links via browsers running on phones or laptops so try both if you experience issues.

I included the last line as I experienced exactly the opposite issue to the one you note, i.e. "Load errors may occur on the ESP32C3 when in AP-Mode and accessed via PC/Desktop browser. Android mobile browsers performed well." For me, accessing my C3 board via my Android Pixel phone didn't work but accessing from Chrome on a MacBook worked fine.

And maybe update the README to reflect the fact that classic ESP32 and C3 definitely work but that S3 does not (I have some experience with ESP32 and I've tried a few S3 boards and they don't work - I'm sure it requires just a trivial change but as it stands there's little point in end users trying these boards unless they're happy to work on the code to get them to work).

Again, thanks for all the hard work on this project 👍