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
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.
LR2021-SDR is an open-source project by Samuel Reynolds (SAMS0N1TE). It turns the Semtech LR2021 LoRa transceiver into a software-defined radio (SDR). On 27 October 2026 the author relicensed it under the MIT licence. The same day he merged firmware changes for transmitting at up to 1 million samples per second. CNX Software first described the pro
Most split air conditioners and many portable units are controlled by an infrared remote. If the unit has no Wi-Fi module, or its Wi-Fi only works through the manufacturer's cloud app, an ESP32 with an IR LED can take over the remote's job. ESPHome has a family of climate platforms that do more than replay recorded buttons: they build the full IR c
Beken BK72xx chips running ESPHome could not talk to a single I2C sensor until now. Change #21586 by Korkuttum, merged into ESPHome's development branch on 26 October 2026, adds a software I2C bus for the bk72xx platform. It is set to ship in ESPHome 2026.11.
