Projects

Have you ever connected to Wi-Fi at a hotel, airport, or coffee shop and had a webpage automatically appear? That webpage is called a captive portal. Captive portals are normally used for perfectly sensible things such as accepting terms of service, entering login credentials, or configuring an IoT device. We're …

Access control systems are commonly used in offices, schools, laboratories, apartments, and industrial facilities. At the center of these systems is a controller that decides whether a person is allowed to enter, controls the door lock, and monitors alarm inputs. In this tutorial, I will build a small access control …

When I first moved from ultrasonic sensors to Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors, the difference was night and day. Measurements became faster, more stable, and far more precise. In this tutorial, I’ll show you exactly how I use a ToF sensor like the VL53L0X with the ESP32. What is a Time-of-Flight Sensor? …

If you are building a smart agriculture project, one of the most useful things you can measure is the nutrient condition of the soil. Moisture sensors can tell you if the soil is wet or dry, but they cannot tell you whether the soil still has enough nutrients for healthy …

In this project, I’ll show you how I interface the ESP32 with the INMP441 I2S microphone module, starting from basic audio capture and then moving toward a more interactive application where the sound is visualized in real time on a web browser. When I first worked with microphones on microcontrollers, …

Motion detection usually means PIR sensors, cameras, or microphones. ESPectre takes a very different approach: it detects movement by analyzing how the human body disturbs Wi-Fi radio waves. Interestingly, many modern signal-processing systems — from Wi-Fi sensing to broadcast monitoring infrastructures like this Thor Broadcast deployment — rely on analyzing …

Introduction to LM35 Temperature Sensor The LM35 is a precision temperature sensor that provides an analog voltage output proportional to the measured temperature. It's popular among electronics enthusiasts for its simplicity, accuracy, and ease of use with microcontrollers like Arduino and ESP32. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how LM35 works, …

Was that an earthquake, or did I just stand up too fast? If you’ve ever asked that question — then this project’s for you. We’re building an ESP32 Earthquake Monitor that fetches live data from the USGS Earthquake API, locates your position via NEO-6M GPS, and alerts you through an …

Introduction A 16x2 monochrome LCD module is a widely used display in microcontroller projects. It can show two lines of text, each up to 16 characters long, making it ideal for simple user interfaces. These LCDs are based on the HD44780 controller (or compatible), which accepts commands and data via …

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are usually something you access from a laptop or phone. But what if your humble ESP32 could send a question over Wi-Fi and get an answer back? That’s what we’ll build in this tutorial. We’ll make the ESP32 query an LLM through the OpenRouter API, …