ESP32 Forum

I am seeing many posts about this but i am not clear on if I can directly program this via an ftdi serial adapter and Aduino IDE or do I need an ESP dev board ?
If latter is the case then I have a working Node32s dev board , can I use it?

The ESP-WROOM-02-U is a module. It has solder points, not pins; it is intended to be placed on a pcb.
The dev kits include an ESP32 module, along with pins, other connectors, and often some additional features like an rgb led and a uart adapter.
For a dev kit with a uart adapter or usb-cdc, an ftdi is not needed, and it is typically easier to use the onboard adapter and simply connect your PC to the usb port. If you wish to use an ftdi adapter, you need to provide an appropriate power supply. They typically do not have the 500mA@3V3 to power an esp32.

yes i know all that ,my question is if I use ftdi and make all connections and give it its own power supply then how do I connect it from Arduino? I dont see any board called "wroom-02u" there.
I do use my "node32s" dev board and I do see it in Arduino.

My second question is : since I have the node32 already working with Ardunio , can I use it to program the wroom-32s module ? if yes what would be the wiring ?

as I dig deeper i found more questions , one of the posts mentioning "Firmware " to be flashed on to the wroom-02u.
So now I have two issues:
1- how to flash the Wroom module
2- how to program the Wroom module

should i open separate post for each?

Please ask the question you really want answered, using the terminology of the application you are asking about. I think you are asking which board to choose in Arduino IDE? I use ESP32 Dev Module (or the variant appropriate one) for all boards. The only difference on the boards is they may be pre-populated with correct specs (eg the flash mem size), or they can have a header file applied (https://github.com/espressif/arduino-es ... _arduino.h) to match whatever stupidity they have painted on the board to the actual pins numbers. For example, on the node32s, they show A0 = gpio36. It is best to ignore those extra markings, always use the actual pin numbers, and you can put your own aliases in your code. That ensures your code is portable.
If you really don't know how to flash (= program) an esp32, please look on youtube. There are 100s of videos, most likely one in your native language.