Using the Built-in USB-Serial-JTAG of ESP32-C3

1. Introduction

In short: The ESP32-C3 has built-in two development toolsusb-serial and usb-jtag, which allows programming, online debugging, and log output with just one data cable, greatly facilitating developers;

The following is from the official data manual introduction

2. Prerequisites

1. ESP-IDF version is 4.4.+
2. Download firmware pin level requirements (Pay attention to the pins of Joint Download Boot mode)

3. Using USB-Serial

usb-serial can be used for firmware programming and log output, saving us a UART port;

1. SDK configuration, set log output to built-in USB



2. Configure download method

   

3. Hardware pin connection

1. Confirm that the driver has been installed correctly

   

2. Select the COM port assigned to the built-in usb-serial of esp32c3 on the computer, and you can download the firmware

   

   View logs

   

4. Using USB-Jtag

usb-jtag is used for firmware downloading and online debugging

1. Configure SDK, same as step 3.1

2. Configure download method

3. Select chip in VSCODE (remember to re-execute menuconfig for configuration after selecting the chip each time)

4. Before online debugging, download the program once

5. Create a launch.json file with the following content

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
     {
       "type": "espidf",
       "name": "esp32c3-debug",
       "request": "launch",
       "mode": "auto",
       "skipVerifyAppBinBeforeDebug": false
     }
    ]
}

• version: This field indicates the version of the VSCode debugger being used. Currently, version 0.2.0 is being used.

• configurations: This field lists the configuration options for debugging operations. In this example, we only have one configuration.

• type: Specifies the type of debugger to be used. Here, we use the ESP-IDF debugger.

• name: This field is the name of the debugging configuration to be launched. Here, we name it esp32c3-debug, and you can define any suitable name.

• request: Specifies the action that VSCode will take through the debugger. Here, we use the launch command to start a new debugging session locally.

• mode: Specifies the debugging mode to be used in the debugging session. In this example, we use mode=auto, indicating that VSCode will choose local or remote debugging based on the situation.

• skipVerifyAppBinBeforeDebug: Indicates whether to skip the application binary verification step to speed up debugging startup. This is an optional parameter, defaulting to false.

Start debugging

Run the debugging program

Thus, we can perform firmware downloading, log printing, and online debugging through the built-in USB-Serial-JTAG of ESP32-C3 with just one USB data cable, oh yeah;