I am a VERY low-effort hardware person (even soldering is um, not my favorite) but for years my approach has been:
1) Go to Amazon and buy a three pack of ESP32 dev boards with headers[0]. They're always some random seller, etc but I've probably had one DoA/failure after buying dozens from random sellers over the years.
2) Get a dupont wires variety pack[1].
3) Optionally (but good to have) get some breadboards [2].
4) Familiarize yourself with various supported temperature/motion/humidity/relays/etc. Esphome has a supported list[3].
5) Search for the chip name, etc on Amazon. Example[4].
6) Familiarize yourself with the ESP32 dev board pins, GPIO, etc. Most sellers will include a picture that looks something like this[5] and most of them are pretty "standard" these days.
7) Wire stuff up, configure with esphome.
8) Once you have things up and running, shove everything in an old box (iPhone boxes are especially sturdy). Other options are various project boxes[6], 3D printing, etc. It's usually easy enough to cut out/drill whatever you need.
At the end of the day you can do some pretty impressive things like directly combining temperature sensors, humidity, presence detection, PIR motion, air particulate, relays, etc even on a single board thanks to ample GPIO and esphome. All for (typically) something like $10 per "location" where you need the stuff. Even less if you buy from Aliexpress, etc.
Of course for "install" you'll need power supplies and (typically) USB-A to micro-USB power cables but most of us have drawers full of these things from old phones, etc. Good news is ESP32 boards absolutely sip power (something like 100mW or less) even with all of your "stuff" attached.
I had a solar powered project setup with environment sensors in my shed. After a while the bugs moved into the elctronics, corrosion ensued and caused shorts which killed everything. The lesson I learned is to seal project boxes up really well. The whole boxing something up and getting power to it thing is the hardest and least enjoyable bit of hardware projects for me.
Good point and batteries, solar, exterior environments, etc are what I would consider "advanced" use cases with significant additional challenges and considerations. All of my use-cases are interior environments with the most "challenging" being garages.
Generally speaking with any kind of lower-level electronics like this frying and bricking stuff is part of the learning experience and a rite of passage.
I read this as I'm standing next to my bare esp32 with dht22 temp sensor hanging off it with DuPont wires...
Nevermind the ones in the schoolhouse, basement, chicken coop...
So, yeah, I fully agree. One day I'll buy a 3d printer but until that day, wires and some tape. Everything seems cheap enough to be sacrificial if that's the end result.
As a fellow lazy hobbyist, I'm gonna suggest that buying the cheapest ESP32 / -C3 / -C6 boards can be a poor value. The cheap ones are often > 25.4mm wide so on a single standard breadboard the pins are only accessible on one side[0]. Also having recently been fighting CircuitPython running out of memory parsing a ~35KB response from a web service, boards with some PSRAM are real nice to have. And speaking of CircuitPython, ESP32-S3/S2 boards can run the UF2 bootloader for that Pi Pico-like experience.
Waveshare's super compact ESP32-S3-Mini (or Zero) has become my first-to-grab. For 5 direct from their China site it works out to $7.35/ea pre-soldered with shipping or save a buck each for unsoldered. 2MB PSRAM and 13 usable GPIO. They also have less cheap -S3 boards in Arduino Nano ESP32, Pi Pico, and ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1[1] formats. And the oddball ESP32 One in Pi Zero format, using an ESP32 w/ off-die PSRAM. They sell on Amazon, too.
A genuine Espressif ESP32-S2-DevKitC-1-N8R2 is $8 on Amazon, a relative bargain if you need it tomorrow and can live with one less LX7 core and no Bluetooth.
[0] If you use the trick of spanning two breadboards side-by-side, that's an extra cost that could have gone towards a better smaller board.
[1] Beware of cheap boards claiming to be copies of Espressif's 25.4mm board designs, many have been widened to ~28mm. Bad ESP32-S[3|2]-DevKit[C|M]-1 copies give themselves away by having enough room on top to put pin labels next to the pins instead of between them.
Fair points but with all due respect completely misses the point and context. My comment was a reply to a new user interested in esphome on a post about esphome.
You're talking about CircuitPython, 35KB web replies, PSRAM, UF2 bootloader, etc. These are comparatively very advanced topics and you didn't mention esphome once.
The comfort and familiarity of Amazon for what is already a new, intimidating, and challenging subject is of immeasurable value for a novice. They can click those links, fill a cart, and have stuff show up tomorrow with all of the usual ease, friendliness, and reliability of Amazon. If they get frustrated or it doesn't work out they can shove it in the box and get a full refund Amazon-style.
You're suggesting wandering all over the internet, ordering stuff from China (or Amazon for roughly 3x the cost of what I suggested), multiple vendors, etc while describing a bunch of things that frankly just won't matter to them. I say this as someone who has been an esphome and home assistant user since day one. The approach I described has never failed or remotely bothered me and over the past ~decade I've seen it suggested to new users successfully time and time again.
In terms of PSRAM to my knowledge the only thing it is utilized for in the esphome ecosystem is higher resolution displays and more advanced voice assistant scenarios that almost always require -S3 anyway and are a very advanced, challenging use cases. I'm very familiar with displays, voice, the S3, and PSRAM but more on that in a second...
> live with one less LX7 core and no Bluetooth
I'm the founder of Willow[0] and when comparing Willow to esphome the most frequent request we get is supporting bluetooth functionality i.e. esphome bluetooth proxy[1]. This is an extremely popular use case in the esphome/home assistant community. Not having bluetooth while losing a core and paying more is a bigger issue than pin spacing.
It's also a pretty obscure board and while not a big deal to you and I if you look around at docs, guides, etc, etc you'll see the cheap-o boards from Amazon are by far the most popular and common (unsurprisingly). Another plus for a new user.
Speaking of Willow (and back to PSRAM again) even the voice assistant satellite functionality of Home Assistant doesn't fundamentally require it - the most popular device doesn't have it either[2].
Very valuable comment with a lot of interesting information, just doesn't apply to context.
> Very valuable comment with a lot of interesting information, just doesn't apply to context.
I guess I'll accept that instead of dragging this thread on ;-)
Except...
"Why doesn't this random cheap ESP32 board fit properly on a breadboard" is a super common new user frustration that's easily avoidable if they knew it was something they needed to be aware of, and I don't understand why people who should know all that will point people to ~28mm boards. My bad for not also pointing out that "ESP32 38-pin Narrow" (NodeMCU ESP32S) boards should be 25.4mm and are plentiful on Amazon at the very cheap end of the pricing spectrum.
If you don’t mind waiting on China post, I’ve had better consistency buying dev boards from reputable Chinese vendors such as DFROBOT. You can often get the boards significantly cheaper than Amazon and there is way less chance of ending up with duds. Usually turnaround is about 7-10 days with FedEx
I keep a stockpile of cheap ESP32 and ESP8266s at home, and any time I need something "ensmartened" (opposite of enshittified?) I grab whichever one is appropriate, solder up what I need, design/3D print a case, flash it from my _other_ laptop which has Chrome on because Firefox doesn't support WebUSB :'(, and it'll show up in Home Assistant for adoption the moment it lands on my IoT WiFi network.
I did exactly this with WLED over the weekend, just to see what the ecosystem was like and what the capabilities are. That flow from soldered hardware to HA integration is astonishingly slick.
