Review on 🔧 ESP32 Basic Core M5Stack Development Kit: Extensible Micro Control WiFi BLE IoT Prototype Board for Arduino by Jacob Sampino

I like this idea. I like the platform, the form factor and how it's built. Unfortunately, it has a pretty obvious downside. Downloading code from the Arduino IDE onto this device is a real disappointment. The device will try to update to get the download, but this almost always fails. The "workaround" is to try to press the power button at EXACTLY the right moment when the Arduino IDE is trying to boot, otherwise you'll get a board not found error. I found out about this problem only after I bought a simple test program and tried flashing it on the device. The M5Stack forum has several forum posts as well as their issue trackers from many other users with this issue. A thread I found was created YEARS ago and this problem still persists. One solution was to solder a capacitor onto the board, which is ridiculous even for a sold product. I'm not a master programmer. When I was writing code for systems like the Arduino, I often had to rework and download the program over and over again because something wasn't working properly. If a defect even prevents you from uploading your code, the device may also be unusable.