I got one of the very early prototype boards long ago and never did anything with it. Well, since SavvyCAN supports wifi based connections now I thought I’d try it out. My first impression is that it’s a huge pain in the rear to program that thing. I found out two things the hard way:
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You apparently can’t use the same Arduino IDE instance to both flash the M2 sketch and the ESP32 sketch just by switching the board type. It locks up the M2. I had to start two copies of the Arduino IDE and have one set to the M2 and the other set to the ESP32 both targetting the same serial port. This is in LINUX so I don’t know if Windows has this issue.
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For some God forsaken reason I can’t start the M2 with the ESP32 module plugged in. Nothing ever happens and the M2 is even locked up. I have to plug the M2 in then push the ESP32 module into the XBee slot… every time I plug the M2 into USB. This gets old. It especially gets old since after uploading a ESP32 sketch it locks everything up and I have to power cycle the m2. Basically any time a butterfly in Brazil flaps its wings I have to power cycle and start over.
I suspect I might have a faulty module. Perhaps I didn’t do it any favors by accidentally letting it roll around in my tool bag for 5 months. But, I like this design better. There’s a nifty micro connector for an external antenna. I like this. PCB antennas are all garbage, I don’t care how well anyone tried to tune them. They don’t work worth squat. The SuperB uses the WROOM32 module which usually doesn’t have a connector and uses a PCB antenna. It’d be cool to offer the version that supports external antennas as such a version does sort of exist - good luck finding a good source for them.
Anyway, I did eventually get it to sort of work for programming so I’ll get some test code together to make the ESP32 create a known AP that you can then connect to with a telnet program or SavvyCAN to gain access to the M2 wirelessly. Just thought I’d share my struggles in case I could help someone else if they have those issues too. Hopefully I just have damaged hardware or something and nobody else is running into the problems I did.