You need to install the right USB-to-serial driver for your chip in addition to the Arduino IDE. If you are unsure which is the right one, install both!
Install Arduino IDE
The first thing you will need to do is to download the latest release of the Arduino IDE. You will need to be using version 1.8 or higher for this guide
Install CP2104 / CP2102N USB Driver
The USB-to-Serial converter that talks to the ESP32 chip itself will need a driver on your computer's operating system. The driver is available for Mac and Windows. It is already built into Linux.
Install CH9102 / CH34X USB Driver
Newer ESP32 boards have a different USB-to-serial converter that talks to the chip itself, and will need a driver on your computer's operating system. The driver is available for Mac and Windows. It is already built into Linux.
If you would like more detail, check out the guide on installing these drivers.
Install ESP32 Board Support Package
After you have downloaded and installed the latest version of Arduino IDE, you will need to start the IDE and navigate to the Preferences menu. You can access it from the File menu in Windows or Linux, or the Arduino menu on OS X.
A dialog will pop up just like the one shown below.
We will be adding a URL to the new Additional Boards Manager URLs option. The list of URLs is comma separated, and you will only have to add each URL once. New Adafruit boards and updates to existing boards will automatically be picked up by the Board Manager each time it is opened. The URLs point to index files that the Board Manager uses to build the list of available & installed boards.
To find the most up to date list of URLs you can add, you can visit the list of third party board URLs on the Arduino IDE wiki. We will only need to add one URL to the IDE in this example, but you can add multiple URLS by separating them with commas. Copy and paste the link below into the Additional Boards Manager URLs option in the Arduino IDE preferences.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/gh-pages/package_esp32_dev_index.json
If you have multiple boards you want to support, say ESP8266 and Adafruit, have both URLs in the text box separated by a comma (,)
Once done click OK to save the new preference settings.
The next step is to actually install the Board Support Package (BSP). Go to the Tools → Board → Board Manager submenu. A dialog should come up with various BSPs. Search for esp32.
Click the Install button and wait for it to finish. Once it is finished, you can close the dialog.
In the Tools → Board submenu you should see ESP32 Arduino and in that dropdown it should contain the ESP32 boards along with all the latest ESP32 boards.
Look for the board called Adafruit QT Py ESP32.
The upload speed can be changed: faster speed makes uploads take less time but sometimes can cause upload issues. 921600 should work fine, but if you're having issues, you can drop down lower.
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