How to Re-initialize a Stuck ESP32 (in CircuitPython) (Shallow Thoughts)

How to Re-initialize a Stuck ESP32 (in CircuitPython)

I designed my particulate air quality sensor project around Adafruit's PyPortal. It uses a ESP32 coprocessor for networking.

Unfortunately, the ESP32 is a little flaky. It tends to lose track of the network after an hour or so:

ESP32 not responding
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "code.py", line 182, in 
  File "adafruit_requests.py", line 725, in post
  File "adafruit_requests.py", line 649, in request
  File "adafruit_connection_manager.py", line 331, in get_socket
  File "adafruit_connection_manager.py", line 248, in _get_connected_socket
  File "adafruit_connection_manager.py", line 61, in connect
  File "adafruit_esp32spi/adafruit_esp32spi_socketpool.py", line 114, in connect
  File "adafruit_esp32spi/adafruit_esp32spi.py", line 899, in socket_connect
  File "adafruit_esp32spi/adafruit_esp32spi.py", line 801, in socket_open
  File "adafruit_esp32spi/adafruit_esp32spi.py", line 422, in _send_command_get_response
  File "adafruit_esp32spi/adafruit_esp32spi.py", line 378, in _wait_response_cmd
  File "adafruit_esp32spi/adafruit_esp32spi.py", line 292, in _wait_for_ready
TimeoutError: ESP32 not responding

I tried re-initializing the network, but it didn't help: re-initializing always died with Timed out waiting for SPI char and SCK in use.

There are lots of people asking about this on the net, but I couldn't find a discussion that actually had a solution for how to re-initialize a stuck ESP32. So I asked Claude. I know, AI, eww ... but Claude seems to have access to CircuitPython code and discussions that Google doesn't index, so sometimes it's the best way to find out how to solve CircuitPython problems. It took a couple of iterations (each requiring a few hours of testing, since it typically takes an hour or so before the network stops working), but we got there. Here's what seems to work for me.

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