The esp32 is a small 32 bit realtime microcontroller with 160mhz of processing power, several megs of flash and last but not least, bluetooth and wifi that’s available for about $6 a pop and can be programmed using both the Arduino language and MicroPython. Today we’ll be going through the setup procedures including how to flash firmware, getting your code onto it and the available peripherals and ecosystem.

What esp32 should I buy? #

There are dirt cheap ones on amazon ^$ and this includes ones with different peripherals sets like oled screens ^$ and lora ^$ . While you can go bottom of the barrel here, I wouldn’t go any cheaper than the “HiLetGo” brand and even those tend to mediocre quality.

So my office lamp is in an awkward location behind a sofa. Instead of re-arranging my office furniture like a sensible person, I decided instead to just install one of those cute $20 tp-link plug that let you toggle stuff via a smart app. Of course, it turns out that the smart app takes an eon to load and I only have my phone on me about half the time.

So the answer of course, instead of re-arranging my office furniture, was to dig through the spare parts bin and make a physical button for my now smart lamp. I chose a particle photon since it speaks UDP (and has a nifty control panel, and I had one.) However, unlike the fancy new models from Particle, this doesn’t have any support for a lithium polymer (lipo) battery so we’re going to use a tp4056 package from Amazon to give us the ability to recharge our LiPo and not draw too much current from it at once. We’ll also need a button.. since that’s kind of the whole bit of this.