Flashing a ESP32-S2 Mini

Hardware
1

I have flashed many types of ESP8266/32 over the years, mostly for Home Assistant via ESPHome and generally don’t have any issues doing so.

Wanting to imbed some ESP32-S2’s on a Lamp 001 project I first tried installing WLED on an old ESP32 D1 Mini board and that seemed to work and then it was suggested I should try some ESP32-S2 Mini boards. I picked 4 up from Amazon and really seemed to struggle with them.

However, I now seem to have a process that works but I would be interested to know why it does and if there could be an easier way of (reliably) doing it, especially for this W10 CLI-phobic mouse user. :wink:

  1. I run the ESP WEB tools and flash it with a basic ESPHome image. That is the only flasher that seems reliable for me.

  2. I then connect to the new ESP host from my mobile and connect it to my Wifi.

  3. Connect to it from my PC and upload the WLED ESP32-S2 file.

  4. Re.connect to the ESP from my phone and re connect the ESP to my WiFi, working WLED. :wink:

I had one running a 300 LED string yesterday and then cut 100 down into one of the LED 001 projects and had some real fun. :wink:

2

you should not be using 3rd party flashing methods. while this can work, you never know if its correctly flashed (wrong bootloader, wrong partitioning table etc.) leading to subtle problems.
the web installer will get an update soon that hopefully resolves some issues.
you can also use the advanced installer which I successfully used on S2: