ESP32-C3 but with DIO flash instead of QIO

[godefroi]

I have (sourced from Amazon) a very affordable little ESP32-C3 development board. Because the ESP32-C3 is quite IO-poor, the designers of this board have chosen to use the flash in DIO mode instead of QIO mode. This makes the flash slower, but frees up two GPIO pins (GPIO12 and GPIO13) that would normally not be available. This DIO mode must be specified when the board is flashed.

Using, for example, .NET Nanoframework, this is specified like this:

nanoff --platform esp32 --serialport COM8 --flashmode dio --update

Using Arduino, it looks like this:

arduino-cli burn-bootloader --fqbn esp32:esp32:esp32c3 --programmer esptool --port COM5 --board-options FlashMode=dio

For ESPHome, the DIO mode is specified in the .yaml:

esphome:
  name: my-esphome-device
  platformio_options:
    board_build.flash_mode: dio

Is there a way to specify this in DeviceScript, or am I limited to the "standard" boards that use QIO flash mode?

[mmoskal]

We should be able to add an option to devs flash command. However underneath it just invokes esptool - i think you can see what exactly with --verbose. You can just run it yourself directly adding appreciate flash mode option.

[godefroi]

I think adding an option to the boards yaml would be the perfect implementation; I don't know how common this setup is, though, so I don't know whether it should be any sort of priority. I could make an attempt at a PR, if that's the sort of thing you folks would be interested in. I'm probably not in a position to exhaustively test the thing, though.

[mmoskal]

Sounds good, PR would great!

[pelikhan]

Maybe a generic option to add random flags to the esptool invocation?

[godefroi]

I have created a (n extremely simple) draft PR here: #606

I would appreciate any suggestions, or I can mark it ready if you're interested in merging it.

[pelikhan]

Your changes have been merged!

[pelikhan]

See https://microsoft.github.io/devicescript/devices/esp32#custom-write_flash-argument

[pelikhan]

The board.json file has a field to pass flash tool arguments -> https://microsoft.github.io/devicescript/devices/esp32#custom-write_flash-argument