ESP32 Thing Development Board

Sparkfun Thing – by far, my favourite ESP32 dev board. WiFi only works when powered with battery (not just USB). Lots of GPIO pins available. Love the 4Mb of program memory. I'm using it as the 'brain' for my Johnny 5 robot connected to Botboarduino.

One of the great things about this board is that it is breadboard friendly, and many ESP32 boards are not. I used Arduino to make a beehive monitor with it reporting the readings through WiFi to a web site. Most of the board functions are now supported by Arduino and active development is adding more all the time. The low power sleep mode is great for my project since it is running on a battery (USB power pack) in the field. Of course there are other development tools that can be used with this board if you want to use something other than Arduino.

I have one of these deployed with a scale under a beehive, reporting the weight every 15 minutes through a website. I used Arduino development, and while not everything the board can do is supported yet, more support is present all the time, including some of the things that Phil mentions in an earlier review. Of course as an ESP32 you can also use development frameworks other than Arduino if you want. In my application the low power sleep is great since it is running on a battery plugged into the USB port. That this ESP32 board is breadboard friendly is a huge plus, as many of the ESP32 development boards are not.

This board will be good. I say that because the hardware is great, wifi, bluetooth LE, GPIO pins and a LiPo charger. However, if you are expect everything to be Arduino software compatible think again. At the time of writing the following has yet to be implemented: *Bluetooth *Analog Input (analogRead([pin])) *Analog Ouptut (analogWrite([pin], [value])) *WiFi Server and WiFI UDP *Real-Time Clock You can still use these but you will have to do it via the ESP32 IoT SDK which is a lower level library. Some of that is not too bad but I would have a look at it first before buying and make sure you're comfortable with using it.

I have only run a few of the examples on it, but it ran them without any problems. I am going to buy a couple more to use instead of Arduinos.