Plenty of cheap Wi-Fi plugs, relays and switches are built around an Espressif chip and ship with firmware that talks only to the manufacturer's cloud. Tasmota replaces that firmware with an open one that runs entirely on your network: a web page on the device, a console, timers and rules on the device itself, and MQTT for anything bigger. This gui
Measuring temperature and humidity is the most common first project with an ESP32, an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi, and the choice of sensor decides whether the readings are useful. Four families dominate hobby shops: the DHT22 (also sold as AM2302), the Bosch BME280, the Aosong AHT20 and the Sensirion SHT4x. They differ in accuracy, interface and how
ESPHome, Tasmota and the Arduino framework are the usual ways to program an ESP32 for the home, but there is another option that suits people who already know Python: MicroPython. It runs a Python interpreter directly on the microcontroller. You type commands into an interactive prompt (the REPL), see results immediately and copy .py files to the b
Almost every home-made sensor, relay or LED controller starts with the same question: which Wi-Fi microcontroller board should it be built on? The four most common choices are the veteran ESP8266, the classic ESP32, the smaller RISC-V-based ESP32-C3 and the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W. They overlap a lot, but the differences matter once you look at memor
ESPHome and Tasmota cover a lot of home projects without writing code, but sooner or later you may want firmware that does exactly what you need and nothing else. The Arduino IDE with Espressif's own Arduino core (arduino-esp32) is the most common way to write that firmware in C++. This guide takes you from a fresh Arduino IDE 2 installation to an
ESPHome is usually paired with Home Assistant, but nothing in the firmware requires it. A device can serve its own web page, answer HTTP requests from scripts and recover from a lost Wi-Fi network by opening a hotspot of its own. That is useful for a workshop relay, a sensor in a holiday cottage or a test board that should work before any server ex
Most small sensors used in DIY home projects talk I²C: temperature and humidity sensors, pressure sensors, CO₂ sensors, light sensors, small OLED displays and I/O expanders. Two wires connect them all to an ESP32. When it works, it's easy. When it doesn't, the usual causes are a missing or wrong pull-up resistor, two devices with the same address,
WLED is open-source firmware that turns an ESP32 or ESP8266 into a controller for addressable LED strips. It gives you a web interface, an app, effects, presets and a JSON API that all work on your local network, with no cloud account. This guide builds a basic controller for a 5 V WS2812B strip on an ESP32. It covers wiring, flashing with the web
ESPHome 2026.10.1 came out on 27 October at 19:33 Polish time, six days after 2026.10.0. It is a bugfix release with 14 changes. Most are small, but three can bite: firmware that crashes at boot after an incremental build, a fan whose state never reaches the MQTT broker, and a coprocessor update that never finishes.
