Atom Echo broken?

[mfdlr]

Hi!

I came to the Atom Echo by $13 voice assistant for Home Assistant article. It was working, just by simple installing.

I put the Atom Echo to an external 5V wall plug charger and I realized that actually the LEDs did not turn on. I was trying to reprogram it, but it stays in the ESPhome "Connecting" loop and fails by timeout. Same thing on the commandline getting the chip_id by esptool fails

❯ esptool.py --port /dev/ttyUSB0 chip_id
esptool.py v2.8
Serial port /dev/ttyUSB0
Connecting........_____....._____....._____....._____....._____....._____....._____

A fatal error occurred: Failed to connect to Espressif device: Timed out waiting for packet header

Same thing with the updated esptool version 4.7.

I tried several button combinations to enter the programming mode, is there any trick? The echo has a Reset button and the larger top button which is from my understand more for application use.