Hi folks,
Making a new thread since I finally recognized the root problem. I thought my model was the T-Deck (don’t ask me why), and flashed it with that firmware. It is the LilyGo LoRa32 V2.1_1.6.
After doing so, it doesn’t boot (no activity on the screen) or show a green light. It does show a solid blue light.
In terms of connection, it appears to be recognized by my computer, but inconsistently. It keeps popping in and out of existence. I may have fixed this with a driver update on my Linux partition, but it’s definitely still happening on Windows. Easier to tell with Windows because I get the little “device connected/removed” notification sounds. Usually it’s the “connected” sound followed by a lot of “removed” sounds. Only way I know of to check on Linux is to run esptool.py chip_id, which won’t give me real-time monitoring.
Fortunately, if I start an operation, it seems to stay connected for the duration. UNfortunately, flashing it with the correct firmware (firmware-tlora-v2-1-1_6-2.2.24.e6a2c06.bin) throws this error:
Configuring flash size…
Unexpected chip id in image. Expected 9 but value was 0. Is this image for a different chip model?A fatal error occurred: bleota.bin is not an ESP32-S3 image. Use --force to flash anyway.
I’m using CLI on Linux (above from that) and the web flash utility on Windows.
So far I have tried different USB cables and slots just to rule things out, and of course fiddled around with drivers. The driver documentation isn’t made for dabblers like me, though, so I’m struggling to tell whether I have them installed properly.
I do wonder if this is the kind of situation where I’d want to force a flash like the error offers. But don’t want to do that unless I know the consequences, of course.
Thanks for any help you can provide 
