According to the data sheet you don't have to connect the GND pad to GND. It mainly for thermals than GND.
Though IMHO I would never not connect it to GND.

Take a look a this. Its built around the ESP32

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/21 ... 183f6b4e9d

My friend build an Ethernet board and ran the clock into GPIO 00 (the default for ethernet applications). Now the board refuses to boot unless you cycle power or reset it multiple times. Yup, I did the same thing on my first build. Wound up tieing the EN pin of the OSC to GPIO 2, and then call phy_...

Start here, and go to the schematic link on the page. It will show you how the kits is wired and what you need.

https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp ... vkitc.html

Use your browser tools, and see what the page receives and sends when you click that button. Then just mimic it.

You can also get them here.
https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?r ... ry&path=83

I learned something today. I didn't realize that FreeRTOS ran in the Aurduino environment. :D Yup, you should give platformIO a try. you can do both with it IDF and ADF. Though i will send a word of caution though with ADF and I2C. In my first days using ADF i liked it because of the ease of OTA ov...

I'm just hooking myself to auto updates to this thread as I have been in the same boat for a long time as well.

I have those adapters as well. I cannot explain why when you stick them in your PC you can use them just fine. Yet when you stick them in a device as a replacement for a uSD they do not work. For instance if you try using it in another device say a RPI board as the boot uSd card it wont boot from it.