ESP-WROOM-32 ESP32 ESP-32S Development Board 2.4GHz Dual-Mode WiFi + Bluetooth Dual Cores Microcontroller Processor Integrated with Antenna RF AMP Filter AP STA Compatible with Arduino IDE (1 PCS)

This is truly my favorite microcontroller packaged into a great development board at an affordable cost.ESP32 works with Bluetooth Classic and BLE for short-distance data streaming. Two of these boards can be connected to each other and share data up to 80 meters away.The Wi-Fi connection is one of the most powerful features. You can connect the board to the internet and communicate with it via a web server. This allows you to make digital applications with physical and analog capabilities. The Wi-Fi communication can also be utilized to make a smart home. You can connect all the ESP32s together and control many different household operations via a Wi-Fi router.The cost is the third big pro. These boards are very affordable for what they can accomplish. This is a must for every circuit lab.I highly recommend this product to anyone who likes building things with microcontrollers.

I was investigating how to enable bluetooth with my Homeassistant installation and found documentation on creating a bluetooth proxy. This item was linked directly on the ESPHome website, which also includes a web-based firmware flasher. Encouraged by how easy this could be, I made the purchase. The competing option was a M5Stack Atom Lite, which looked quite promising as it comes within a case already. After weighing the shipping times, I went with this product. The two are essentially the same price if you factor in a separate case for the ESP-WROOM-32.Sifting through the reviews here, I found that manually installing drivers for the board would be required. If you just plug in the device, Win10 shows a popup but it does not actually install the needed drivers. You will need the easy to google CP210x USB to UART Bridge VCP Drivers, CP210x_Universal_Windows_Driver.zip available from Silicon Labs.After that, the web app flasher was easy to run. It wrote the FW needed and then lets you specify your wifi network. I had read many reviews that were disappointed with horrible wifi range. I am 1 floor below my router and it shows -71dB signal. Not great, but still functional. Maybe that's not bad considering there's no antennae. Other wifi devices in the same room were about -65-70dB.Immediately after connecting to wifi, Homeassistant recognized the device and it was easy to add it as an ESPHome device. It easily found the 3 bluetooth thermometers I wanted to connect (Thermopro TP357). I haven't had any notable dropouts for this first week but will continue to monitor.As the last step I am purchasing a case for the board. There are some generic plastic boxes available on Amazon, but I decided to go with Etsy for a custom 3D printed one.

I bought these boards as a newbie to experiment. They work fine and I've had no issues in using them. However, they are a little wider then most boards and take up 9 of the 10 columns on a standard breadboard. This leaves only one row of pins accessible when using your breadboard.

I have nine of these devices, for use as Home Assistant sensor platforms. All have worked perfectly using the Arduino 2.4.6 IDE. With dozens of these ESP32 boards out there - some with issues - these have proved to be good.

Works like any ESP32 but I wish they called out that you need to make sure you have a data micro usb cable since not all of them are. Took me like an hour to figure that out.

These little boards are like having a Swiss Army knife for electronics projects. I started out thinking, "Let’s see if I can just blink an LED,” and now I’m building a DIY smart home like some kind of mad scientist. Setup is straightforward, and the possibilities are endless—Wi-Fi projects, Bluetooth gadgets, you name it. My only regret is not buying them sooner. Highly recommend if you enjoy feeling like a tech wizard tinkering in their lair.

These units boot, can be attached to via Putty, but are showing an operational state of STA (station) + SoftAP. I believe I will have to flash the ESP32 manually over SPI. The ESP web tools, Arduino IDE and esptool.py cannot connect via serial port @115200 bps, only Putty can connect. Using the EN (long press) and BOOT (short press) buttons appears to change the operational state to flash the device from external tools connected via SPI, but I have not tried yet.

All 3 of mine worked great, without defects. Has WiFi built in. I used one for WLED (Plug in and flash - super easy), controlling a servo via web server and (WIP) a midi controlled LED string. Works with Arduino software for programming