I'm playing around with some ESP32S2 Mini Modules, and they are a pain. After much fiddling around I have them working with the espressif IDE on a linux laptop. The biggest problem that I had was that in the default configuration they fool around with the USB port in such a way that either the tty port totally disappears, or the IDE won't talk to it except with some painful button pushes on the module (painful because the buttons are tiny and I had to push two of them at once). The problem disappeared when I made the menuconfig->Component config->ESP SystemSetting->Channel for console output->USB CDC selection. After that I no longer had to go through the button-pushing exercise (except when my downloaded program crashed early in the startup process). The other slight annoyance (at least on my laptop) is that I usually had to enter 'idf.py flash' and 'idf.py monitor' commands two times before the esp module could be accessed.
So right now I have a working setup, although it was somewhat painful getting to this point. These issues (and lack of documentation) may be why there are so many negative reviews on Amazon for these modules. My advice for other would be to stick with the original ESP32 if possible.
So right now I have a working setup, although it was somewhat painful getting to this point. These issues (and lack of documentation) may be why there are so many negative reviews on Amazon for these modules. My advice for other would be to stick with the original ESP32 if possible.