ESP32-C6 pocket dev board loads code but does not (seem to) run

Development Boards ESP32
1

I have a new SparkFun Qwiic Pocket Development Board - ESP32-C6 and the project I’m copying has been a total failure. So I removed the sensor, removed the display - down to just the dev board. Let’s try the simplest thing possible. Nope.

Specifically my code compiles fine. I’ve tried little Serial hello world and blinking the LED - stuff like that. And then it even seems to upload. An LED on the board quickly blinks and I get this at the end of the console:

Writing at 0x0004c330 [==============================] 100.0% 138027/138027 bytes... 
Wrote 246576 bytes (138027 compressed) at 0x00010000 in 0.9 seconds (2119.4 kbit/s).
Hash of data verified.

Hard resetting via RTS pin...

And that’s it. No serial messages ever come back. The light never blinks. Nothing.

I’ve tried holding down the Reset button on the board during upload and that (correctly) makes it say there is no free port. I’ve tried holding the other (boot?) button during upload and that does nothing noticeable. I’ve tried changing all the settings I can (the combinatorics are daunting), especially the “USB CDC On Boot” which I’ve seen mentioned in other posts. Baud is 115200 but I’ve tried others.

I’m doing all this from a normal updated Debian 12 Linux machine with a user in the dialout group. I’m using arduino-ide Version: 2.3.7 Date: 2025-12-17T16:01:58.874Z. I have two USB cables that both produce the same (lack of) result. The IDE says I’m using “ESP32C6 Dev Module” on /dev/ttyACM0 (which appears when I connect the dev board to the USB).

So I’m stumped. This is not my normal programming environment and maybe I just didn’t turn on the magic “Results appear here!” window or something obvious to everyone else. But to me it looks like enough is working (compiling, uploading, quickly blinking the light on upload, being affected by the reset button state, etc) that I should expect a tiny bit more to work so that this board is actually useful. Thanks for any help.

2

I borrowed a computer with Windows (10 Home) on it and tortured myself with installing the arduino-ide there. Interestingly I was able to get a blinking light demo to actually blink the LED on the dev board. In other words the code compiled, uploaded, and ran.

However, when I tried serial tests, they did not work. No serial messages ever were picked up by the monitor even when the blinking light told me the program was running.

This means that something is not quite right with the Linux tools. And the Serial output failure is still a mystery. But the cable, dev board, and chip itself are capable of running some code, and I am not, apparently, incapable of making that happen.