And now I need to work out what to do with them. Aliexpress link here.

Why?

I have been playing around with a board I bought a while ago which has an ESP8266 and Arduino UNO on it. Getting the thing working has been a bit of a pain, even if the ESP8266 has been around since 2014. A couple of post on it in this series.

ESP8266 a little long in the tooth now (7 years!). The ESP32 was the new kid on the block in 2016 (there are a few variants now) and beats the ESP8266 in…well everything. See below from makeradvisor.com.

Why 10 of them?

Because each of them costs less than the price of a cup of coffee.

What arrived?

The ‘variant’ I have is the ESP32-VROOM-32U (link to Expressif PDF). Below is a snip from the manual. Some interesting stuff on there. On-chip Hall sensor kind of weird?

BTW: ‘D’ vs ‘U’

Somewhere in the process I selected ‘U’, as opposed to ‘D’. They are identical except ‘U’ has a connector for an external antenna….and need an external antenna. No biggie, though I would have preferred the ‘D’. I suppose have the ‘U’ version means I have the option of a bit more range, so not a bad thing.

The IPEX antenna things are two-a-penny.

What next?

I am looking around other stuff I can smart-up. Watch this space.