Making Sense of the upload Behavior of an ESP32C3 SuperMini

Development Platforms
1

Hi guys,

I’m quite unexperienced with this kind of development, so please excuse me if this is a weird or misplaced topic.

I recently bought a couple of these ESP32 C3 SuperMini Development boards:
image

These come without any documentation, and I could not find a lot of information on the Internet either.

I am able to flash the board, using the “seeed_xiao_esp32c3” board, but I have to manually enable boot loader mode by pressing buttons on the board.

With my previous ESP32 S3 DevKits this was not necessary, so I was just confused if this is normal behavior.

After flashing the board it does not seem to automatically reset. At first I thought the board was defective because I could not get any of my Serial output in the Serial Monitor, but then i realized that after reconnecting (plugging out and in again) the board it seems to work and run my program, sending the expected output via serial. This was also different for the Boards I have previously used, they all seemed to reset and start the uploaded program automatically.

So I would appreciate it if someone could shed some light on this behavior and tell me if what I’m seeing is perfectly normal, or if I’m doing something wrong.

2

I am having problem also. But it’s quite easy to do on the Arduino IDE.

3

What Arduino IDE → Tools settings do you use in the Arduino IDE? (Screenshot).

It should be 1:1 adaptable to PlatformIO.

4

Arduino esp32-c3 SuperMini
Arduino esp32-c3 SuperMini1008×879 70.2 KB

On VSCode, I got it to upload successfully but it won’t run and didn’t see the output on the Serial Monitor. I even tried the simple Blink app with an added Serial.print and didn’t see my board blink nor anything on the Serial monitor, all the while without any errors.

5

Well the “Nologo ESP32C3 Super Mini” is included in Arduino-ESP32 3.0.1 but PlatformIO is still on 2.0.16.

So you would either have to fallback to a generic ESP32C3 with USB-CDC enabled, e.g. board = adafruit_qtpy_esp32c3, or,

use the Tasmota fork that has Arduino-ESP32 3.x, e.g.

[env:supermini_esp32c3]
platform = https://github.com/Jason2866/platform-espressif32.git#Arduino/IDF5
framework = arduino
; reasonably close
board = lolin_c3_mini

Certain serial monitor DTR/RTS settings may also affect being able to see the serial monitor output, given -DARDUINO_USB_CDC_ON_BOOT=1. See here for all possible combinations.