Comment on I built a smart mailbox
Heavybell@lemmy.world 5 months agoI’m sorry to say I don’t. :/ You can grab dev boards off aliexpress for cheap, and they’re really easy to play with. Just connect the to your PC via USB to load your initial ESPHome script, and they spring to life. From there you can do basic testing, since they’ll get power from the USB. It’s just a matter of what you decide you want to hook up to them after that. I assume you’re looking for like a hobby kit, like you can get for arduino boards? Something that comes with a bunch of LEDs and I2C components you can fiddle with? Unfortunately I don’t know of any that come with ESP32 dev boards, but I’ll admit I’ve not looked. Sorry.
justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Yes exactly, when looking for it I find only Arduino kits. Some time ago I got interested in pine64, was reading a while and bought a soc board plus some stuff around it (like a touch screen and emmc storage). Turned out that particular board didn’t come with the display output and to install a system on emmc you need an UART Adapter, so I ended up buying more stuff, which I was missing. Don’t want to do the same again ^^
With esp32 I have the problem that there are so many different and I don’t see how they differ (except the price)
Heavybell@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Okay so that is an issue with the ESP32, sure. There are a lot of variants.
So from what I can tell, the ESP32 is the SoC chip and what you usually get is a dev board which has that plus a bunch of power regulation bits, a USB connector and UART so you can easily program it, etc. That part varies mostly by pinout. I.e. Same features, different pin location.
There are also variants of the chip, but those are usually more costly and will be named things like ESP32-S2.
Every one I’ve seen can run off 5v or 3.3v and uses the latter for logic, so if you got yourself an arduino kit and then just bought an ESP32 dev board it would almost certainly work with whatever is in the kit. Both are microcontrollers, not microprocessors, so they tend not to have OSes or screens.
justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Thank you, that helps a lot. This kind of hardware introduction is missing on esphome.io :)
Heavybell@lemmy.world 5 months ago
No problem. The one I used is an ESP32 DevKitC, and you can find info about it on Espressif’s site, or just google the pinout diagram. For basic tasks it should be all you need since it has lots of binary pins, two ADC channels, two DAC channels, realtime clock, special pins for waking it from deep sleep, two I2C, etc. Though if you want to do video input you probably want something else, I’m learning.
Anyway, if you can spare the money to get one just to toy with I’d definitely recommend it.