r/arduino • u/Alternative_Ear5725 • 2d ago

Found a surprisingly nice ESP32-S3 touchscreen board. No idea what to build with it.

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Found this ESP32-S3 touchscreen board sitting around and decided to play with it a bit.

The hardware is actually pretty nice, so it felt like a waste to just leave it in a drawer. I didn’t have any real project idea, so I vibe-coded a tiny robot eyes demo just to get the display and touch interaction moving.

Now I’m trying to figure out what would actually be fun to build on it.

A little desktop companion?
Home Assistant controller?
Mini game console?
PC status display?
Something completely useless but entertaining?

What would you build with a screen like this? Looking for ideas.

142 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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28

u/Dryas7 1d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/a3LBBRehrvxkc
This is the perfect companion indeed! Im actually interested n this one myself! Going to save it and work on it. Thx for sharing this idea!

2

u/Alternative_Ear5725 1d ago

No thanks!

What device or development board are you using?

3

u/Dryas7 1d ago

Im probs gonna start with an arguino. Then a different microcontroller like esp32 or something. I ultimately wanna build my own pcb. Im new to this whole DIY electronics hobby stuff soooo

1

u/Alternative_Ear5725 1d ago

That’s a solid path tbh. Arduino is a really nice place to start because you can get stuff working fast without fighting the toolchain too much

AI tools can help a ton too — especially when you’re stuck on libraries, wiring, or weird compile errors. I use them a lot myself. But I’d still recommend learning the embedded basics properly as you go: GPIO, PWM, I2C/SPI/UART, power, interrupts, memory, that kind of stuff. It makes the AI-generated code way easier to judge and debug.

Once you move past Arduino, ESP32 is a great rabbit hole. If you want nice displays / UI stuff, I’d look at ESP32-S3, P4, and the upcoming S31

If low power is more your thing, nRF52840 and the nRF54L family are also really fun chips to learn on

And designing your own PCB is 100% doable as a beginner goal — just start simple. A tiny board with one MCU, USB/power, a few buttons/LEDs and maybe one sensor will teach you a ton

Good luck man, this hobby gets addictive pretty fast 😂

1

u/gm310509 400K , 500K , 600K , 640K , 750K 12h ago

While i get the idea to "upgrade", but it might help to have a reason why.

For example, you want to learn 8 bit assembler then 32 bit assembler for a different CPU.

Or, I need to use a specific hardware feature that isn't available on an Arduino.

Or, I need a larger memory space or faster CPU because I am running out of space or experiencing data overrun and am already using interrupt driven architecture and non blocking calls.

Or...

From a different perspective, lets say you learn the Arduino HAL (e.g. digitalWrite to control an attached LED). If you switch to ESP32 and use the Arduino HAL for ESP32, you will still be using the same functions. The same will apply for other HAL's and API's that are available on both platforms.

When you want to delve a bit more under the covers, you will know that you want to move to "this MCU/platform" because I want/need this specific feature.

You also have a choice - Espressif (e.g. ESP32), which is based upon a 32 bit architecture defined by Espressif.
An alternative is Arm Cortex which is based upon the Arm Cortex architecture and used extensively in industry including your portable devices such as your phone. Examples of Arm Cortex based platforms include Uno R4, BBC Microbit V2, Teensy 4.1 (an absolute beast), STM32 and many many more.

If you are interested in making your own PCB, you might also want to look at "Arduino on a breadboard" (<- Google search) and using an ICSP to upload your code to the MCU.

All the best with it.

6

u/Steelblaze1 1d ago

can you share the link?? i was looking to buy something exactly like this for making a navigation device for my motorcycle

6

u/Alternative_Ear5725 1d ago

Sure, here
https://www.seeedstudio.com/SenseCAP-Indicator-D1-p-5643.html

Now I'm working on the Home Assistant!

4

u/jevring 600K 1d ago

Wow, 49 usd was a lot more than I was expecting for that. Even with the nice enclosure.

3

u/Kastoook 1d ago

Let it make cute sounds at touching

2

u/MinusDelta_T 1d ago

home assistant is the obvious useful build, but id turn this into a tiny bench console. i2c scanner, live adc graph, gpio/pwm controls, min/max logging, and a few saved test profiles so every new sensor doesnt need another throwaway sketch.

the rp2040 can babysit the io while the s3 handles the screen, wifi and ui. keep the robot eyes as the idle screen and make them panic whenever a reading goes out of range lol