STEVEN STARK asked 3 years ago
I recently purchased 10 DOIT DEVKIT V1 boards from Banggood and only 3 actually worked!! Has anyone else had this problem?? If you have bought these boards from another distributor and they all worked, please give me the name of the distributor. This is the first time in my (very long) life that I have encountered such a high number of infant failures. The mode of failure is either; the COM port on the board does not function which make the downloading script fail, there is a problem with the flash memory which causes the code to continually reset while executing or the code starts executing and then just goes into some sort of endless loop!!
Steve Mercer answered 3 years ago
I have ordered all of my boards through Amazon and all have worked great. The distributors have been Arducam, Songhe, Hiletgo and Makerfocus. I have other items from Hiletgo that work great as well. I guess I would recommend Hiletgo for all of your needs 😉
STEVEN STARK answered 3 years ago
Thank you very much for the information!! I have designed over 100 embedded controller applications over the years and I have come to love the ESP32 as a platform for various applications.
STEVEN STARK answered 3 years ago
Here is the take-away from my experience with the ESP32 boards. Whenever the 2.4 GHz transceiver on the board is turned on (for wi-fi applications), the current draw goes from ~ 40 mA to 240 mA!! The USB port in most computers is current-limited to about 200 mA (if you are lucky). This is something that I have known for years but I had no idea that the transceiver drew so much current and so I am certain that the erratic behavior of the ESP32 boards was caused by low voltage at the 5V input. I connected a bench power supply to the VIN pin on the ESP32 boards and … voila!! … they all worked perfectly!!
Needless to say, I am feeling rather foolish at this point (which is not the first time for me) but I am excited at the prospect of utilizing the ESP32 as a wireless network interface in a number of applications!!
Again, I want to thank the forum members for providing me with some great information.
Sara Santos Staff answered 3 years ago
Hi Steven.
The problems you described didn’t seem like a problem of the ESP32, but rather a problem with the power supply or the code (in case of continuous resets, sometimes the problem is related to interrupts not being properly implemented).
I’m glad you found the issue that was causing the problems with the ESP32.
I usually order my ESP32 board from Banggood or eBay(vendor alice1101983), and I never had any problems.
I’ll mark this issue as resolved.
If you need further help, you just need to open a new question in our forum.
Regards,
Sara
Steve Mercer answered 3 years ago
I guess the issue is all down to the type of computer in use. I am a Mac guy and my current Intel i7 Mac mini provides 900mA per USB 3.1 port. I never thought about PC’s only supplying 200mA per port.