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Huge huge fan of ESP32s over Arduino/RPi/etc for any/all projects where I can do so. I’ve probably got 15-20 ESP32 projects around the house, and have done some
by sen 4y ago
Huge huge fan of ESP32s over Arduino/RPi/etc for any/all projects where I can do so. I’ve probably got 15-20 ESP32 projects around the house, and have done somewhere around 80-100 for other people.
Arduino does a great job with marketing but at the end of the day you could do 99% of Arduino projects with an ESP32 for 1/10th the cost, use less power, and get way more features at the same time, while still using the Arduino IDE or VS Code with Platform.IO.
- sgt 4y agoHow do you connect them? I would actually love to have a few PoE powered and connected ESP's since you have to power these things anyway.
- milsorgen 4y agoWhy via a wifi mesh of course: https://www.espressif.com/en/products/sdks/esp-wifi-mesh/overview https://www.espressif.com/en/products/sdks/esp-wifi-mesh/ove...
- sgt 4y agoThat's really cool. I'd start with star topology first though, with just 4-5 devices. In my use case it's just gardening stuff.
- sen 4y agoDepending on the project, but either find a nearby USB port (I have home temperature sensors powered off the back of my TV, and other projects off USB ports around the house) or use battery power. Batteries can last months on ESP32s if you set them up right. They have great deep-sleep modes and can use practically nothing unless they're actively needed.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y agoI use old phone chargers accumulated over the years. It's been 3 or 4 years since I started doing that and they don't seem to mind at all.
- dragontamer 4y agoWhy use ESP32 if you're powering with PoE? Might as well use an "Ethernet-on-board" like Teensy 4.1, and then use a PoE splitter (ex: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3239 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3239) to power it. Why pay for WiFi power (which is rather expensive) when you literally are sending Ethernet communication wires to your uC ? https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy41.html https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy41.html
- blutack 4y agoI use these https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP32/ESP32-POE/open-source-hardware https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP32/ESP32-POE/open-sou... - they support proper PoE as opposed to the dodgy passive stuff you usually end up with with splitters. Personally I'd take an ESP32 over a teensy 4.1 unless you specifically need the extra GPIOs or something. The teensy's are great hardware, but you're stuck with either Arduino or hand rolling. You don't pay for WiFi power if the RF amp is off, and ESP-IDF for me is far better to work with than the Arduino software ecosystem especially once the complexity starts going up. Also, if you just want to make widgets and not learn embedded development esp-home is brilliant.
- zackees 4y ago[dead]
- pjmlp 4y agoI don't have any use for them, but I am also a fan of the ESP32, mainly because it represents having the desktop computers of my 9th grade (similar somehow to PC1512) available on the palm of my hand, and with much better hardware.
- tambourine_man 4y agoAnd WiFi, running on 3AA batteries, GPIO and costing US$ 5. Same feeling.
- mkl 4y agoWhat kind of battery life do you get? I know it depends on workload/wifi use etc., but any such data would be helpful.
- Zenst 4y agoSo many variables due to application, so camera streaming will use more that a humidity/temp/pressure sensor that deep sleeps for a minute, awakes, reads and sends the data and pops back to sleep. A good YouTube Channel I find for microcontroller aspects is - Andreas Spiess One of his videos you may find useful - https://youtu.be/ajt7vtgKNNM https://youtu.be/ajt7vtgKNNM
- bombela 4y agoI made a bunch of temp sensors that would wake up every 5min and post the data via wifi. Powered by 4 C-cells it lasted about 450 days.
- hackshack 4y agoAgreed - they deliver a very flexible, cost-effective, performant MCU. Downsides (to me) are toolchain and power consumption. Has the Arduino toolchain been enough for home automation? I’ve been playing with Zephyr, but when I’ve gotten down into those gritty late-AM Saturday night programming hours, actual library support seems to be patchy, outside Arduino and Espressif toolchains. I ended up running MicroPython on the Sonoff Dual R3 (a cheap and cheerful box about the size of a fig, controlling two separate line voltage relays) but GPIO access is really unsafe, which makes it useless for sensing, but fine for control. For everything else I use the ESP-WROOM-32, a fairly ancient dev board, and it’s highly capable, but I get the sense there are better boards for prototyping in 2023. If you have a preferred board, do tell!
- sen 4y agoI use a wide mix of ESP-WROOM-32, Lolin ESP-32-OLED (when I want on-board display), and all sorts of other random ones. For all my home automation I use ESPHome and Home Assistant (20+ custom devices, plus however many light bulbs and Sonoffs and stuff). For tool chain I personally use Platform.IO in VSCode but I’ve done a fair few with Arduino IDE and it works in a pinch.
- csstanton 4y agoWould you mind sharing some of the Home Assistant projects you’ve built? I have some ESP32-CAMs coming and plan to setup a cat box monitor.
- ontarionick 4y agoNot the person you’re replying to, but I’ve built a battery voltage monitor (to alert if my home generator battery is discharging) and am working on temperature monitors for my BBQ and oven! Those have been left on accidentally in the past
- phoehne 4y agoThere are 2 flavors of the ESP, depending on model. The Xtensa cores and RISCV, go with the RISCV variant. The Xtensa variant requires you to use their compilers, which are derived from he ones provided by Cadence. There's a better path long-term for the RISCV cores to get tooling on par to what's available for ARM.
- KaiserPro 4y ago> use less power, I was about to go off on a rant about how power hungry the ESP32 is. But having a look its not as bad as I remembered (or perhaps I was thinking about the 8266) https://diyi0t.com/reduce-the-esp32-power-consumption/ https://diyi0t.com/reduce-the-esp32-power-consumption/ depending on the board you can get it to as low as 15ma in "normal" use(light sleep microprocessor only, modems off). But when the wifi is on it chows down powers.
- dragontamer 4y agoThe chips various Arduino-like chips are 5mA active, 500uA when light sleeping, 5uA in deeper sleep, and hundreds-nanoamps in deepest sleep. 15mA "light sleep" is really heavy actually compared to most things IMO. Hell, the Nordic Semiconductor nRF5340 uses 5mA _WHEN TRANSMITTING ON ITS RADIO_. https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/nRF5340 https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/nRF5340 ----------- ESP32 is in that zone between the low-power (and ultra-low power) uCs and Raspberry Pi. ESP32 is ~20mA to 50mA, comparable to RP2040 (which I also consider to be very "heavy"). Arduino-chips, like the ATMega328pb (as old as it is), is on the scale of "Years on AA batteries of sleep". While chips like ESP32 are on "Hours of AA batteries of sleep". -------- The only advantage to ESP32 is its WiFi. If you need anything else at all, there's a lot of better chips available. In particular, Teensy is probably the best board for ~50mA to ~100mA levels that the ESP32 finds itself in.
- MegaDeKay 4y agoTeensy 4.1 is very capable indeed, but it is also roughly 4x the price of an ESP32 WeMos D1 Mini where I live.
- blutack 4y agoPersonally, I'd would say another advantage is sdk. IMO ESP-IDF is up there with Silabs and nRF in the top tier of dev experience. Then STM/TI etc and Microchip a very distant last. The ESP32 isn't ideal for basic battery stuff that needs to be awake all the time, or size constrained stuff - that's where nRF and BLE shines (or Silabs/Cypress). However, in deep sleep you can get 10uA< which is decent assuming you wake up rarely, do a bit of WiFi work and go back to sleep. For the right job (powered stuff that needs BLE, WiFi or ethernet, maybe hosting a local webserver for config and/or mqtt) the ESP32 is an absolute bargain compared to alternatives and a pleasure to work with to boot. The modules also typically have lots of flash onboard, ideal for embedding web UIs.
- mhb 4y agoA little off topic: Is there a video compression chip that I can put on a board with an ESP32 to make a live streaming camera similar to what can be done with an RPi or Jetson Nano?
- raphman 4y agoWhy not use an ESP32-CAM board?
- MrBuddyCasino 4y agoI don't understand the question - this chip has an H.264 encoder on board.
- mhb 4y agoYes. I didn't look carefully enough at the new one. Thanks.
- em3rgent0rdr 4y agoov2640 camera has hardware JPEG compression.
- MegaDeKay 4y agoThat you can actually buy an ESP32 right now is another huge advantage over the RPi.
- trilbyglens 4y agoI would highly recommend checking out toit lang for esp32 projects. It's really really nice to use.