You may have noticed a warning at the bottom of the MongooseOS demo in the demo code repo, about accidentally blowing up the Ethernet phy while playing with MongooseOS demo code.

I didn’t find any time to pursue this further, but I have to give the people at MongooseOS credit for getting to the bottom of this! I received this message from them:

We did some research, and found the problem with ethernet. It happened to be quite stupid: the default config for the built-in LED used pin 22, which conflicts with the ethernet TX.
So, this command should set the board correctly:
mos flash esp32
mos config-set eth.enable=true eth.mdc_gpio=16 eth.mdio_gpio=17 board.led1.pin=-1 board.btn1.pin=-1

This highlights an issue that can happen with other firmwares as well: misconfigured pins doing damage to the phy. By default, the wESP32 ships with MicroPython installed and it is configured correctly out-of-the-box for the Ethernet phy as it is configured on the wESP32. If you load different firmware though, it is your responsibility to ensure the ESP32 pins are configured correctly and will for instance not configure an ESP32 pin as an output that connects to a phy output, and thus cause a short. Please refer to the schematic to make sure. The wESP32 website section on Software provides more information on wESP32 support in different environments.

If you have ordered one or more wESP32's, I recommend you try it with the default MicroPython firmware when you first receive it, to confirm the hardware is sound and it receives an IP address (check with lan.ifconfig()) from DHCP over Ethernet, which only happens if the phy is working. All units are tested to do this before they are shipped, but this way you can prove to yourself the hardware is OK and nothing bad happened during shipping. After that you are free to use whatever firmware you want of course, but I will not replace defective units once they have been flashed with different firmware, as I cannot know what happened to them.  Thanks for understanding!