Tutorials

Most ESP32 development boards are designed for prototyping. Connect a USB cable, upload a sketch, and start experimenting. But when you want to put an ESP32 in an enclosure or run it from a battery, the board's design becomes as important as the microcontroller itself. The DFRobot FireBeetle 2 ESP32-UE …

A PIR sensor is a normal first choice when you need to detect a person in a room. However, there is an important limitation: PIR sensors are much better at detecting movement than determining whether someone is simply present. This becomes a problem for applications such as room occupancy detection. …

Artificial intelligence often brings to mind powerful GPUs, huge servers, and applications like ChatGPT. An ESP32, meanwhile, is a microcontroller with only a fraction of the processing power and memory of a modern computer. Surprisingly, these two worlds are becoming increasingly connected. An ESP32 can run small machine-learning models locally, recognize …

The ESP32 family has changed quite a bit since the first appearance of the original ESP32. We have had the ESP32-S2, S3, C3, C6 and several other variants aimed at specific applications. Now Espressif has introduced another major member of the family: the ESP32-S31. At first glance, the name makes …

One of the reasons I like the ESP32-S3 is that you can get a surprising amount of memory on a very small development board. Some variants come with 2 MB of PSRAM, while others have 8 MB. That is much more memory than the ESP32-S3 has internally. However, the advertised …

We are done with a few basics on PIC microcontrollers. Now it's time to learn how to load a program to the device itself. There are, in fact, plenty of circuits that can load a HEX file to a PIC microcontroller. Older programmers used the classical RS-232 and parallel ports, while …

The ESP32-S3 Mini, often sold as the ESP32-S3 Super Mini, packs a surprisingly powerful ESP32-S3 microcontroller into a board only slightly larger than its USB-C connector. Despite its size, the board gives you a dual-core processor, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, native USB, PSRAM on some versions, and enough GPIO pins …

The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 looks almost identical to the original Raspberry Pi Pico, but underneath is a significantly more capable microcontroller. The original Pico uses Raspberry Pi's RP2040, while the Pico 2 replaces it with the newer RP2350. The change brings faster processor cores, more RAM, twice the flash …

The APDS-9960 is probably better known as a gesture sensor. It can detect hand movements such as left, right, up, and down, while also providing proximity sensing. However, the same small module also contains red, green, blue, and clear light-sensing channels. This means we can also use the APDS-9960 as …

Adding an antenna to ESP32 can improve Wi-Fi and Bluetooth reliability when the board is installed far from an access point, placed inside an enclosure, or surrounded by components that interfere with its built-in PCB antenna. However, the modification involves more than soldering a piece of wire to the board. …