There is a new debugger from Espressif available. It seems to be a successor of ESP–PROG.
Does anybody know whether PlatformIO can handle this device for debugging?
To give an answer myself and to the community.
Yes, in the usage there is no difference to the old esp-prog version.
The USB to serial converter is based on an ESP32-S3. As before, the driver must be reconfigured with ZADIG tool to a WinUSB device. I’ve ordered one and should have it in hands end of the week. I hope my problems with the old module are gone than.
I keep you informed…
No, its currently not supported. PlatformIO looks for an vid 0403 and pid 6010 but the esp-prog-2 has vid 303A and pid 1002.
This leads to following error:
Error: no device found
Error: unable to open ftdi device with vid 0403, pid 6010, description ‘', serial '’ at bus location ‘*’
Have you tried to add vid and pid in udev-rules here platformio-core/platformio/assets/system/99-platformio-udev.rules at 23a19a8c316df9547f32b6d9507b18eaa96b52fd · platformio/platformio-core · GitHub
Using `esp-bridge` for esp-prog 2 should work.
Well, after getting my very own PROG-2, I can confirm it works.
It has to be used as ESP-BRIDGE, and it has to be reconfigured with ZADIG.
It’s a pretty nice little device. I got mine from espressif’s amazon store at half the price of a generic ESP-PROG.
Well worth it.
Neat, but this is surely a shrinking market since almost all of the new (post 2016) Espressif chips support JTAG over the USB connections.
Sure, some super-embedded devices will find economies of bringing out half a dozen pads for finicky JTAG pins instead of two signal-balanced pins for USB that could give power, debugging console, and JTAG all over a single commodity cable but this just has to be a product that most developers (especially the hobbyist-heavy audience here) just won’t need.
Citing
”The quickest and most convenient way to start with JTAG debugging is through a USB cable connected to the D+/D- USB pins of ESP32-S3. No need for an external JTAG adapter and extra wiring/cable to connect JTAG to ESP32-S3.”
That said, $14 for an S3 dev board with a bunch of GPIOS that includes 2.54 and 1.27mm cablesisn’t bad and if it actually allows wireless jtag (I dont’ want to think about turnaround latency on that, but it’s a nice trick for shared development where multiple developers could reserve/lock a board for development and debug it via internet - wired or otherwise) is a cool trick if they allow it. It’s easy to pay more than that for a Segger, ST-Link, or FTDI Friend solution with cables.
For those curious about details, the USB device on these is actually a stacked device with multiple endpoints. Endpoint one is the familiar CDC/ACM serial endpoint that gives you /dev/cu.usbmodemZZZ or com32: or whatever your OS calls it and endpoint zero is the JTAG interface. The better parts implement this as [two USB controllers multiplexed onto one phy](USB Device Stack - ESP32-S3 - — ESP-IDF Programming Guide v6.0.2 documentation; lower-end devices like S2 and ESP32-C3 have different designs details, but most still offering JTAG over USB. (C2 comes to mind as not offering it, but that’s an ESP8266 wearing groucho glasses as a disguise and rarely discussed here.)
Contributors to this thread: if you’re on ESP32 part after the original one, what’s the appeal of this board?
Answering your last question: Nothing. There’s nothing the inbuilt JTAG won’t do better than wiring 6+ pins of this board to your project. So… for anyone designing with newer devices, there is no use to this device, hence no appeal.
The real value of this board is for those still using the old, cheap and reliable ESP32, which I would guess is a good majority of this community. But also those who want to debug (which won’t be many….)
For them, It’s a cheap alternative to the original ESP-PROG, and I’m all in for budget devices. I’m guessing being a poor student was as hard for me as it is for anyone. And I surely would be pleased in paying those 13$ instead of 29$+ for a device that works just the same.
I respect the honesty of that answer. Thanks.
I’d suspect the $.99 ESP32-C3 and S3 zero/supermini class of boards (OK, introductory price, but still a fraction of the cost of even this deicated JTAG board) have obliterated the “poor student” market for the cranky original ESP32s. That’s certainly reflected in other groups. But I could be wrong! I respect that people with designs using the originals still need good tools, so thanks for sharing this.
It’s also sad how many that are new to the biz refuse to learn/invest in the skills and tools to learn and use things like debuggers, logic analyzers and such. They’ll spend twenty hours of guessing at a problem instead of two hours learning and using more appropriate tools. It’s definitely a recurring theme we see in the “it crashed and spat up a bunch of numbers. EEEK!” posts we see every week over people landing on an exact source line with a carat showing if it was a load or a store that faulted, decoding the exception, etc.
The newer chips making JTAG easier is definitely a reason to move toward them for newer designs and for casual development.
Cheers!
Indeed. My uni teachers had a lot to say about the topic of refusing to learn anything but the most necessary to get a passing grade.
At least on my country, and I imagine a lot of countries around the world, access to newer development boards is… difficult. Here, the most common dev board is still the old Uno R3. and in the last 5 years or so, closely followed by the OG ESP32 (at just 9$ a pop!).
Newer esp series are available, but with a cost of over 40$ for a devkit…. I see why they are uncommon as they are…
This is one of those “nature of the beast” topics that really has been discussed a lot on the internet. But I digress!
The topic relating to this thread and the ESP-PROG-2 is that it is a cheaper and more flexible alternative to the old ESP-PROG. As such, I think it deserves some support and and I think it’s a great addition to the hobbyist market, even if it came out a little late to be really useful.
Thanks for making me reflect on the true purpose of this board!
Cheers!
-BC