Key Takeaways
- ESP32 boards may be complex for beginners but offer a wide range of features for DIY projects.
- Projects like a Wi-Fi scanner, web server, weather station, and smart soil monitor are great for starters.
- An ESP32-powered surveillance camera with object recognition is a unique project worth trying out.
Unlike SBCs, microcontrollers have a high learning curve, making them a bit complex for most beginners. Once you include the barrage of features offered by advanced boards like the ESP32 family, it’s easy to see why newcomers may shy away from DIY projects featuring these microcontrollers.
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However, you don’t need the skills of a DIY god just to create some simple projects. A handful of sensors, LEDs, and a little bit of patience are all you need to bring these five DIY projects to life using your ESP32.
5 Wi-Fi scanner
Simple, but great for beginners
A Wi-Fi scanner capable of displaying the SSID, signal strength, encryption level, and other details of the wireless networks in your area is the perfect starting project if you’re just starting out. Once you’ve connected your ESP32 to an IDE on your PC, all you have to do is write a function that can read these values from the microcontroller and display them on the output section of your IDE. If you’re not familiar with coding, you can use the WiFiScan example file in the Arduino IDE as a reference for this project.
4 Web server
You’ll end up using it quite often in ESP32 projects
Let me preface this section by adding that due to the ESP32’s limited computational prowess, a web server hosted on the microcontroller won’t be as impressive as the LAMP or Flask-based servers I built using the Raspberry Pi 5. That said, the ESP32 server has its uses. For instance, you can attach the microcontroller to a breadboard and some LEDs, and build a webpage that can control the lights.
This tutorial from Instructable user Common9899 is perfect if you’re stuck figuring out the coding and/or circuitry aspects of this project. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with creating a web server, you can implement it in the remaining project ideas on this list.
3 Weather station
To keep track of the environmental parameters
If measuring the temperature, pressure, and humidity using a BME280 sensor seems familiar, then you may have read my tutorial on how to build a weather station using a Raspberry Pi. In fact, the underlying procedure is mostly the same even when you’re on an ESP32 board.
Once you’ve connected the BME280 (or another similar sensor) to the correct GPIO pins on your ESP32, you can download the specific code library for your sensor inside the Library Manager tab in the Arduino IDE. Once you’ve modified the code snippet for the network credentials to match the SSID and password of your Wi-Fi connection, you can run the code and marvel at your newly built weather station.
2 Smart soil moisture-monitoring machine
An amazing addition to your gardening toolkit
Like the weather station, you’ll need a proper sensor for this project, namely a capacitive moisture sensor. Again, you’ll need to interface the sensor with your ESP32 board before connecting the latter to your PC and launching the Arduino IDE.
From there, you can write a function that accepts the moisture value from the sensor and displays it as output, with some more code to update the readings at regular intervals. If you’re stuck, you can import the Gravity Soil Moisture Sensor from the Library Manager tab.
1 Surveillance camera
To monitor your surroundings
An ESP32-powered security camera is a solid project that even has limited object recognition functionality. Of course, you’ll need a camera module that’s compatible with your ESP32 board, and there are plenty of affordable options for you to choose from.
As always, you can launch the Arduino IDE after you’ve attached the camera module to the microcontroller. For the code, you can load the CameraWebServer example file in the ESP32 section of the Examples tab and run the code after modifying the network SSID and password parameters.
Gaining useful hands-on experience with the ESP32
Starting your DIY journey on an ESP32 instead of the uber-popular Arduino or Raspberry Pi Pico boards may seem rather unorthodox, especially when they don’t have as much learning material as their rivals. That said, the ESP32 microcontrollers have better processing capabilities and a wider array of functions, so you’re bound to require them at some point if you’re into robotics, circuitry, or automation.
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