“Absolutely blown away at how amazing this little board is considering the price point. BLE HID works amazingly (even though for ESP32 I needed to do some serious mods to example code) and it's a dream once you get going (Arduino setup can be complex but it's well documented). Be careful with that LED though, it seems to run super hot!”
“The ESP32-C3 is a smaller board (physically and processor-wise) than what I would normally use, but as it is intended for IoT projects I thought I'd give it a go.
It worked out really well, allowing me to sense wirelessly (via ESP-NOW) when my air-con is on/off. The in-built neoPixel is also more useful than you might imagine; in my case it changes into one of three colours depending on the state of the air-con unit.
Mounting the board is more of a challenge. Ideally, a bespoke PCB would be ideal, so it could be soldered onto the board (like an ESP32 module) but in my case I only needed one GPIO (OK, I added a DS18b20 temperature sensor - it felt appropriate for an air-con IoT device) so I just 3D printed a simple wall bracket that I might add a lid to one day (ie never). Photo shows it in action in my workshop.
Really easy to program. Visual Studio Code with Platformio knows all about this board, as does the Arduino IDE with the new Espressif boards manager. Plenty of documentation on the Pi-Hut website and, of course, the excellent Waveshare and Espressif sites too.
So smaller, physically, but very capable with its Risc-5 160MHz processor and plentiful SRAM/Flash. I haven't yet used the BLE feature but it's on my list. I'll definitely be using them in other IoT projects for sure, which is why I ordered three from the PiHut!”
