I wrote a simple utility program that runs on 64-bit Linux x86, OS X or Windows to make it easy to load the most recent firmware (downloaded from my website) for either tCam (gCore hardware) or tCam-Mini/tCam-POE.  I did this primarily to make it easy to program a gCore for those people who are building tCams but it can also be used to load the most current tCamMini firmware as well.

It simply requires connecting the camera's USB serial port to the computer and programming.

It can be downloaded from my website.  Look for the tCam Family Serial updater section.

The application itself is pretty simple xojo.  It's able to program the ESP32 on the different platforms because it includes compiled versions (for each platform) of the Espressif esptool.py python program.  I just use xojo's shell object to run the binary version with the selected serial port and paths to the downloaded firmware binary files.

I was led to this idea when I found that the Espressif ESP32 Arduino package included compiled versions for Windows and Mac OS X.  I dug around their github repositories until I found a script that uses pyinstaller to compile the python esptool.py.  I only had to create a binary for Linux x86 which I did with the following command after installing pyserial and pyinstaller.

pyinstaller -F --add-data="esptool/targets/stub_flasher/*.json:esptool/targets/stub_flasher/" esptool.py

This left a built executable called esptool in a dist directory.  Very cool.