I got the Sigma Delta putting out a waveform that I was looking for. But when I connected the power rail to the input of the inductor for voltage boost, the system stopped booting correctly.

I had several possible problems to look at.

GPIO16 is tied to reset on some ESP8266 modules allowing wake from deep sleep based on the RTC. I tried taking it back out of the code and I am still getting unexpected boot up activity. Doesn’t appear to be the problem, I may have to come back and have another look.

I haven’t built with the change of memory maps until last week. The bootloader may not be linking properly with my code or I may have made some mistakes pertinent to the linker. I removed the new files and recompiled without GPIO16 support and therefore a smaller memory map that fits without modification of the link files. I commented out most of the code and it still would not boot into my code. Code doesn’t appear to be the problem.

Finally, the boost circuit may draw very large amounts of current that will cause noise back into the rest of the system.  Power may not be stable enough for reliable operation. I disconnected the 5V from the boost circuit and got reliable boot.  I need the boost circuit to work, so I replaced the 10 ohm resistor with a 68 ohm resistor( Maximum current draw from USB would be 5v/68Ohms or 74mA). It wasn’t enough. So I tried 220 Ohms, then I tried 1KOhms.  This means the maximum current I can provide to VPP is significantly reduced.  I will add capacitance to the PCB on the 5V lines to allow for better noise immunity. The board is booting reliably.  The problems I had earlier with the CH340G were probably related to this problem as well.  I still needed to run the CH340G at 3.3V, So I am glad I changed that already.

The boost circuit is not able to create a voltage above 5v with the 1K resistor. Testing the ADC reading, I discovered I had R8 and R9 Cross labelled on the board. So I switched the labels on the layout.

The firmware is running again.  I can put a pulse stream out to the Voltage Boost circuit but the 1K limiting resistor is too large to work correctly.