Installation

How to flash the firmware to the hardware.

General

You have three options to flash/install DroneBridge for ESP32 to your device.

  1. Official Online Flashing Tool for DroneBridge for ESP32 (recommended)

  2. Use the official espressif python-based tool esptool.py

In any case, go and conduct the following steps first:

  1. Connect the ESP32 via USB to your computer

  2. Determine the serial port number e.g. via the Windows Device Manager - in this example it will be COM4

If your board is running the USBSerialflavour of the firmware and if you want to flash a different firmware you must press and hold the boot button (on the official board labelled with "Reset Settings" or "R" on the official case) of the ESP32 during powering. After that, you can release the button. Only then will the flashing tool be able to detect the board and flash a new firmware.

Official Flashing Tool

This is the most convenient and fool-proof way to install DroneBridge for ESP32. It does not require any download and it works on all platforms. You will love it (at least I hope so).

  1. Go to the installation page

  2. Connect the ESP32 to your computer

  3. Follow the steps presented by the tool

    1. Click Connect and wait for the tool to detect the ESP32`s chip

    2. Select the desired release of DroneBridge for ESP32

    3. The UI will automatically present you all with your board-compatible "flavours" of the release. If you are not sure just choose the standard one. You can read more about the USBSerial flavour in this Wiki. It is a special version that an ESP32, configured as a ground station, can use.

    4. Click "Flash" to install the firmware to your device

    5. Unplug and re-plug the ESP32 to properly restart the device

ESP-Tool (console)

  1. Install esptool.py via pip In windows use python -m esptool ... instead of esptool.py ... with the following commands

  2. Erase the flash first with esptool.py -p COM4 erase_flash (may not be necessary with all releases, but prevents issues)

  3. Change to the extracted esp32c3 folder (the pre-compiled release files of DroneBridge for ESP32 you downloaded from GitHub)

  4. Run the flashing command that came with the release binaries for the esp32c3. It may look something like: esptool.py -p (PORT) -b 115200 --before default_reset --after hard_reset --chip esp32c3 write_flash --flash_mode dio --flash_size 2MB --flash_freq 80m 0x0 bootloader.bin 0x8000 partition-table.bin 0x10000 db_esp32.bin 0x110000 www.bin

Look here for more detailed information

Unofficially Supported Boards

Run the command specified with the release binary and for your board using esptool.py erase the flash first by running esptool.py -p <port> erase_flash. Alternatively, you can follow the guide for the web-based serial flasher.

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