Hi – my son and I just put together a pair of Chatter 1.0’s and they worked great.
Loaded Micropython on one, played for a bit. Then we went to go restore the stock firmware, and at that point, it would not start up.
Upon startup, it would issue an error message over the serial port: “Non-volatile storage retrieval error: %d”. We tried re-flashing the firmware multiple times, also I used esptool.py to erase flash between attempts – no go.
What worked successfully for me was to download the entire 4 megabyte image off a working Chatter 1.0 using esptool.py, and then flash it to the bricked one. It immediately came alive.
So there is something wrong with the tool, I would feel safe to say…
Mike