[SOLVED] Vigo Tec VG-L7X unable to connect to PC via Serial

[MartinGiersberg]

I bought this Laser off Ebay for very cheap. The could not get the controller board to connect to the Computer by any means (neither Arduino, nore XLoader or VigoEngraver) despite having all the right drivers to interface with the device installed on the PC Thus it was not possible to control the engraver (VigoEngraver) or to flash any new Firmware onto it (Arduino & Xloader).

After ruling out any hardware related Issues on the board itself I subled uppon this explenation:

This revealed, that the connectivity issues must come from the ESP32 Chip in particular. Closer inspection in the Arduino IDE promted this error message when uploading the costume firmware from arkypita: "Failed to connect to ESP32: Timed out waiting for packet header"

A brief Google search later I found this article detailing the origin of the issue and tracing it back to the poor power supply of the ESP32.

As shown in the article connecting a 10 uF electrolytic capacitor between the EN pin and GND resolved the issue.

With the help of this diagram provided by juliusgeeklab

and some steady hands I managed to more or less elegantly solder on the capacitor

which immediately solved the Issue. The ESP32 was recognized by the Arduino IDE and I was able to uploade arkypiat's Software by following the instructions provided by him

[arkypita]

Thanks for sharing your experience