New revision of the Hifi Esparagus (ESP32-S3 variant) just came from the factory, and after some testing, it is available for purchase from Lectronz and Tindie (Elecrow availability comes later during the summer).
The reason for redesigning the board was the weirdness of the USB-serial on the ESP32-S3. One of the features of the S3 is a USB host, which allows an alternative way to flash the board – S3 supports both the serial method (same as classic ESP32, TX, RX, and GPIO0/RESET dance), and the USB-only method. This allows for saving on a USB-Serial converter chip, let alone the extra possibilities of the USB port, such as a built-in debug interface.
One of the pitfalls of that is you need to understand your Serial interfaces really well, since now you have both hardware Serial on pins 43/44 and a USB Serial interface (Assuming it is enabled in SDKCONFIG, and that’s an important distinction!).
Even more important to know that if flashing over USB-Serial using web-serial requires forcing the board into firmware download mode, since unlike espidf tools, web serial cannot do that automatically. That’s a major inconvenience for the board that is locked up in the case, like the Esparagus series.
The first revision (G) came out with a serial converter chip, which makes sure that flashing is possible without disassembly. Unfortunately, the ESHome default image is not tuned to use the hardware serial, so while flashing is easier, actual board onboarding becomes more troublesome as a result.
Current revision (H) is back to serial over USB host, so standard onboarding flow works as intended, but to avoid the first flashing inconvenience, I flash all boards with the Esphome image. Since S3 makes most sense for Home Assistant use, I think that’s a reasonable solution.
Going forward, I’m looking to implement a Voice PE-like onboarding experience (that turned out to be incredibly elaborate technically), which would be a huge step forward in usability.
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