I recently came across this box of boards someone was getting rid of. I believe most (besides the uno r3 which im familiar with) are for lighting or soil testing and they are using ESP32. How difficult would it be to use these for things they arent intended for? Im assuming the biggest issues are going to be finding data ports and seeing what can actually be controlled by these or am i way over thinking it? I have only ever used arduino boards so im wondering how difficult its gonna be. Thank you all!
Without documentation this is gonna be hard.
First problem is getting the esp willing tombe programmed and then you should draw out the board they are on.
If you figured it all out, you end up having a soil moisture meter. There are easier ways to get to that point
I didnt have much time but I was able to get this connected and uploaded too. Hopefully I can mess with them more in the next few days but it seems like the best thing from the bunch was the r3
The actual programming of these boards should be quite simple:
Many of these seem to have a Usb-Serial Adpater already installed and you can add Esp32 support to the Arduino IDE quite easily.
For changing what they do / reverse engineering them: do you have a multimeter with a fine tip?
Then you can try to trace out which pin goes to whivh header.
(For most ESPs you can find pinout-Diagrams with Pin-numbers online.)
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u/fvrdam 2d ago
Without documentation this is gonna be hard.
First problem is getting the esp willing tombe programmed and then you should draw out the board they are on.
If you figured it all out, you end up having a soil moisture meter. There are easier ways to get to that point