0Problems flashing an ESP32

I recently needed to set up a new ESP32 device to extend my plant mon­it­or­ing BLE net­work. I hit one or 2 issues doing so that were worth noting

Firstly it turns out some USB to Mini-USB cables just don’t have the data wires con­nec­ted at all. So if you con­nect the device and its power light comes on but win­dows does­n’t detect a new device then the cable might be use­less. I checked mine with a spare kindle that we had sit­ting around and con­firmed no data. The 4^th cable I found finally worked

Secondly it turns out even some cables that do sup­port data still don’t work prop­erly. Tips online say some makes of cable have a capa­cit­or or some­thing embed­ded some­where. If you are using “esp-home flash­er” you might get an error that looks some­thing like
esp32 Unexpected error: could not open port 'COM10': PermissionError(13, 'Access is denied.', None, 5)
Again, if you hit this, try a dif­fer­ent cable!