I’ve just received my shiny new ESP32 Thing Plus in the mail yesterday, and I can’t do anything with it. The board does not show up in the Arduino IDE, nor does it show up in terminal when I use ls /dev/cu.* or ls /dev/tty.*
I’ve confirmed my USB port works fine with a different board, the ESP32 Thing.
Edit: is there a power LED or a heartbeat LED to indicate that the board is even running? The charge LED comes on when a LiPO is plugged in, but that’s it.
So yeah…not sure what do do to troubleshoot this, or if the board was defective when it shipped.
Have you installed the CP2104 USB Driver? We have that driver available for direct download or you can download it from SiLabs following the link in [this section of the Hookup Guide.
Once you install that, you should see it show up as a port. Let us know if you have any other questions or continue to have issues and we can troubleshoot further.](ESP32 Thing Plus Hookup Guide - SparkFun Learn)
I am not certain of how you would verify the driver install but it may be that the OS is blocking the install. To unblock it, SiLabs recommends opening the System Preferences Security & Privacy pane and unblocking the system extension.
I’m unable to resolve this issue still. The driver installation does not appear to have been blocked by the OS, but the device still does not show up on the serial port.
What specific Operating System are you running? Also, have you tried multiple USB cables? Similarly, are you certain the USB cable you are using works and has the data lines connected? A common mistake is using a power-only micro-USB cable intended for charging USB devices. Another option would be to test on another computer.
I am also having this issue. I have tried multiple cables and computers same issue. In my case the board was previously working ( I have it connected to the environmental shield) it ran overnight (though on a Macbook pro computer that was asleep). The next day both Red and Blue led are solid but the serial port is not recognized. One additional point last night the sensors were reading but not consistently, I was getting alot of backwards ??? with the weather example. Never seemed to be able to connect to the wireless either. I’l review all the solder some of them seem like they could use more solder under close blown up picture. I’ll give this a try. Yes I have already installed on both PC and MAC the drivers no difference in behavior.
I am using a Sparkfun ESP32 Thing paired with the ESP32 Thing Environmental board (DEV-14153)
I re-soldered all 4x 10 pins; after reviewing all for continuity the board began to stabilize on mounting. I think the issue before was that the board did not alway USB mount; While the board seems more reliable on mount now. The issue I have now (is probably what I was seeing before is that it actually is not stable on either the power or the USB connector (plugged into a PC or to a USB power brick). Can you help me analyze this stability issue further. Drivers are updated I will experiment on different platforms (PC vs MAC) today for stability of power; though on the HardNok 6 port USB charger it is not remaining powered seems like measured in hours of reliability.
To start troubleshooting this issue, can you please take a few photos of both your ESP32 Thing and the Environmental Board and attach them to your response? My guess is there was a hardware issue with the two boards like a loose connection or bad solder joint causing the problem.
Now, for the stability issue, can you please elaborate on the behavior you are seeing? Is it not consistently staying on or not showing up as a port or something else? You can force the ESP32 into boot mode by holding GPIO0 LOW during reset. To do that on the ESP32 Thing, just hold the GPIO0 button down and press the reset button, that will force it in to boot mode and you should see a port show up on your computer.
Thanks for taking those photos. I am pretty sure the issue is related to some bad solder joints on the ESP32 Thing and the ESP32 Weather Shield. [This section of our General Troubleshooting Guide has some good pointers on reworking and checking your solder joints. From your photos, it looks like you have several floating/unconnected pins on both the ESP32 Thing and the Weather Shield so try following the tips in the guide I linked above and rework the boards and that should resolve the issue.](https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/sparkfun-troubleshooting-tips#bad-solder-joints)
I can review the solder joints again; Though the board seems stable as I have been running it direct connected to my computer with Serial monitor running for the last 12 hrs. My guess is there is a problem in the example code going up to the Weather Underground instead which is timing out in 45mins; it also reports some unusual time reports in some cases Nan.
Weather Underground has changed to a payed subscription only model; any code that was counting on older free keys would need to be updated to use some other site.