Tindie companion shield won't connect for ESPHome config upload

[PoebelPogge]

Hey 👋

I bought couple of days ago the companion shield from Tindie. It made the long wide way from Canada to Germany. Now I'm trying to flash the ESPHome config on it, but it constantly says that it there is no connection.
By using the CLI it says:
ERROR Running command failed: Failed to connect to ESP8266: No serial data received.
Using ESPHome web it connects to the first step but then it says that:

Failed to initialize. Try resetting your device or holding the BOOT button while selecting your serial port until it starts preparing the installation.

No matter if I hit Prepare for first use or if I try to upload the compiled .bin

Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

[gcormier]

I'm not sure if ESPHome web works great with the C3 yet. There've been a few patches in the last few weeks ( eg https://github.com/esphome/esphome/releases/tag/2023.12.6 ) specifically for the C3 but I haven't had great luck. Maybe using command line will improve the results?

There are steps here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUrNMm47_AY

If you can provide more details on the steps you are taking, I can try it as well.

[PoebelPogge]

okay, following that video, I got a step further, now it says:

ERROR Running command failed: This chip is ESP32-C3 not ESP8266

I used the megadesk.yml from the repository.

Changing platform: ESP8266 to platform: ESP32-C3 leads to the following error by running: esphome compile megadesk.yml:

INFO ESPHome 2023.12.9
INFO Reading configuration megadesk.yml...
Failed config

esphome: [source <unicode string>:5]
  name: megadesk
  comment: ESPHome Device controlling Megadesk controller
  
  Unknown value 'esp32-c3', did you mean 'esp32'?.
  platform: ESP32-C3
  board: d1_mini
  includes: 
    - megadesk.h

[gcormier]

Please use https://github.com/gcormier/megadesk/blob/master/esphome/megadesk-companion.yaml

[PoebelPogge]

Awesome! Thank you so much! :)
That did the job :)

[Ragetti13]

I am having a similar issue with trying to get the first flash working. I have it connected up to my windows PC and have downloaded all of the python and esphome repositories on powershell and both version are up to date. I've used the above link to download the referenced files from github but when trying to compile i receive this error:

INFO ESPHome 2024.6.6
INFO Reading configuration megadesk-companion.yaml...
Failed config

ota.unknown: [source megadesk-companion.yaml:50]

  'ota' requires a 'platform' key but it was not specified.
  password: ''

Any suggestions?

[gcormier]

Esphome updated some configuration requirements recently. I'll try to make an update but unsure if I will have time this week. You can use an older esphome version for now, or maybe someone else will submit a PR to update the yaml with the new requirements.

[gcormier]

Config updated for new esphome - https://github.com/gcormier/megadesk/blob/master/esphome/megadesk-companion.yaml