ESP-WROOM-32 ESP32 ESP-32S Development Board 2.4GHz Dual-Mode WiFi + Bluetooth Dual Cores Microcontroller Processor Integrated with Antenna RF AMP Filter AP STA Compatible with Arduino IDE (3PCS)

Worked so well for a Bluetooth proxy in Home Assistant that I need to order more

I picked these up to make a cheap COB LED strip smart. It only came with an RF remote which is not sustainable. They arrived without documentation, but that isn't a problem for me. My will is stronger than that. They arrived sealed in antistatic bags and looked new. The onboard USB port is a micro USB. I used it to flash WLED and setup wifi. I powered the board and the LED strip from the same power source because they used the same voltage. Then, I used a GPIO pin to communicate with the light strip. It was easier than I thought it was going to be. A heat sink is not recommend because the ESP chip does not produce much heat. They do not include a display. The quality is fine for my purposes. If you are just getting started with something like this, read the WLED site or ESPHome. Step 1. The website will flash the firmware for you.

I was investigating how to enable bluetooth with my Homeassistant installation and found documentation on creating a bluetooth proxy. This item was linked directly on the ESPHome website, which also includes a web-based firmware flasher. Encouraged by how easy this could be, I made the purchase. The competing option was a M5Stack Atom Lite, which looked quite promising as it comes within a case already. After weighing the shipping times, I went with this product. The two are essentially the same price if you factor in a separate case for the ESP-WROOM-32. Sifting through the reviews here, I found that manually installing drivers for the board would be required. If you just plug in the device, Win10 shows a popup but it does not actually install the needed drivers. You will need the easy to google CP210x USB to UART Bridge VCP Drivers, CP210x_Universal_Windows_Driver.zip available from Silicon Labs. After that, the web app flasher was easy to run. It wrote the FW needed and then lets you specify your wifi network. I had read many reviews that were disappointed with horrible wifi range. I am 1 floor below my router and it shows -71dB signal. Not great, but still functional. Maybe that's not bad considering there's no antennae. Other wifi devices in the same room were about -65-70dB. Immediately after connecting to wifi, Homeassistant recognized the device and it was easy to add it as an ESPHome device. It easily found the 3 bluetooth thermometers I wanted to connect (Thermopro TP357). I haven't had any notable dropouts for this first week but will continue to monitor. As the last step I am purchasing a case for the board. There are some generic plastic boxes available on Amazon, but I decided to go with Etsy for a custom 3D printed one.

Leaving a review so that others don't struggle the way I, as a newb, just did, jumping into electronic engineering as a hobbyist. The specific boards I received were the ESP32-D0WD-V3 (revision v3.1). You can find the datasheet for them in the Espressif Systems documentation. I bought this to play around with Home Assist and Meshtastic... And it's been an experience to say the least. None of the markings of the physical board lead me to the correct documentation, so I advise anyone buying ESPs off amazon as a newbie, to use the "esptool chip-id" in your command line or terminal to figure out exactly what board you are working with. Now you may need to do a bit of internet searching to figure out how to do that, but if you are buying development boards it's a necessary evil. The boards work as intended but I'm giving 4 stars because it's unclear what exact boards you will receive, and knowing that is half the battle. For anyone getting into Meshtastic, I'd say for ease of use, don't get this particular board as it is not supported natively, I had to build from the source code to flash this, which was impossible until I found the correct documentation. (As of Oct. 2, 2025, I'm still working on cleaning up the code and before I do a pull request to hopefully add it to their supported hardware.)

Exactly as ordered. Easy to program. A bit old, will go for a newer model when these are used up.

I bought five of these to make as bluetooth proxies for my Home Assistant Green. It was fairly trivial. Go to the ESPHome website. Install the appropriate driver for your system (CP210x Universal Windows Driver X64 for Windows 11 in my case), plug in the device to a USB C (assuming you got the USB C version). Flash it, add your wifi credentials and add it to your Home Assistant. Maybe 5 minutes for my first one. Then you can just distribute them all over the house. Obviously this little computer can do a lot of other things, but I can guarantee this works for this without any difficulty at all. I'll have to figure out some kind of case, and I am adding POE to USBC adapters to each so I can just stick them up by my switches in various rooms.

Great generic esp32 devkit boards. Easy to program.

Really useful microcontroller

I had a few old Chinese addresses able rgb strips that just had a very basically controller and crappy power supplies. Install WLED on this board and now all the strips are smart light strips and they perform better than some of the other branded RGB led strips.

Am able to connect sensors and host a server on it!

Ok

Great for my daughters uni project