Briefing
The board had worked five days earlier. After the microphone sketch went on, Windows saw only a device whose descriptor request failed: no BOOTSEL drive and no serial port, so neither a 1200-baud reset nor picotool had anything to talk to. An elevated script ran the software recovery steps twice and logged the results. The issue ranks a firmware hang during TinyUSB bring-up as the likeliest cause and says a cable or power fault fits the evidence equally.
The follow-up issue asks for a hub that can drop VBUS, an SWD path that does not depend on the target's USB, and firmware that parks itself in BOOTSEL after repeated watchdog resets. Its recovery ladder ends with flagging a human and stopping. Later comments report the same failure on a Linux bench with an ESP32-C6.
Written by the Boards & Bots curator