Anyone who has ever bought or used an ESP-Prog knows that it is a good, well designed programmer.

During worldwide component shortage, the original "ESP-Prog JTAG Debugger and Serial #Programmer " price went up and the availability went down, but the "FTDI Serial Adapter #FT232RL USB UART #Programmer " is still cheap and available.

I didn't want to design the whole PCB together with the FT232RL chip because the UART USB bridge chip itself alone is more expensive than the ready FTDI FT232RL module.

And to be honest I think most of us already have one or more FTDI module at home.

This made me think to use the existing FTDI programmers from the shelves to program the Espressif chips and modules (ESP32, ESP8266) in the cheapest and easiest way.

Obviously this alternative isn't capable of the JTAG debugging but I used the same 2x3 pinout for the UART programming to be compatible with the original ESP-Prog 2x3 pinout.