5 ESP32 tasks price constructing that don’t have anything to do with fixing your Wi-Fi

The ESP32 is commonly handled like a tiny networking equipment. People flip it right into a Wi-Fi extender, connection monitor, captive portal, or journey router, regardless that its radios are solely a part of what makes the board attention-grabbing. Underneath that acquainted wi-fi characteristic set is an inexpensive, programmable controller that may learn sensors, drive shows, transmit infrared instructions, course of Bluetooth alerts, and achieve this rather more.

So for those who’ve solely been utilizing your ESP32 for network-related projects, you’re missing out. Whether it is making a dumb piece of tech sensible, or including a bit of comfort to your life, the ESP32 can do much more than you in all probability give it credit score for.

A thermostat that talks to dumb air conditioners

A DHT22, a couple of buttons, and Tapo plugs do the heavy lifting

I wished a tool that would management the ACs in my bed room and workplace to take care of a selected temperature, in addition to present a fast bodily button I may use to regulate lights with out having to fiddle with my cellphone or Home Assistant on my PC. Additionally, I additionally wished to observe the print standing on each my 3D printers.

The reply? An ESP32 hooked up to a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor and some push buttons related to my Home Assistant occasion. The ACs are controllable through Home Assistant courtesy of some low cost Tapo P110 sensible plugs, and Home Assistant automations handle the remainder.

An LED strip that makes failures inconceivable to overlook

Blinks for printers, doorbells, and web outages

If you have bought a daily LED strip mendacity round, you’ll be able to join it to an ESP32 and make a smart lighting strip. Better but, for those who join it to your Home Assistant occasion, your sensible LED strip can grow to be an indicator for all types of various occasions round your home.

I’ve arrange mine with assist from varied Home Assistant automations to blink in sure colours when my 3D printers are performed with a job, when the doorbell rings, or when my web occasions out. An web outage alarm may sound like a networking undertaking, however it does not repair, increase, or reconfigure the community. It merely makes a failure inconceivable to overlook.

A voice assistant that by no means leaves your home

A $5 ESP32-S3 and an area LLM as an alternative of a spherical journey to somebody’s server

I’ve had a number of run-ins with voice assistants previously. Google Assistant, Cortana, Alexa, Bixby, Siri – I’ve used all of them, and I’ve had the identical criticism with each single one in every of them: why do they should make a spherical journey to a third-party server to show a light-weight on in my very own home?

As is the case with practically each customized sensible residence system I’ve made, the voice assistant too facilities round an ESP32, the ESP32-S3 N8R8 to be particular. I had one mendacity round from a earlier undertaking I made a decision to decommission, however you will discover a brand new one for as little as $5. The ESP32 acts as a satellite tv for pc that captures the wake phrase and sends the audio to an area LLM operating through Ollama for processing. It’s important to choose the right ESP32 right here, as not all of them will help this activity.

Connected to the ESP32 is an INMP441 I2S mic and a MAX98357A I2S amplifier board. For the speaker, I salvaged a small 4Ω speaker from a damaged Bluetooth speaker, and since I wished some visible suggestions for my voice assistant, I added an 8×8 WS2812B LED matrix. The actual price of the elements will differ based mostly on the place you might be, however it should not be greater than $15.

Your Claude spending, on a display you’ll be able to look at

Daily price buckets from Anthropic’s personal API, proven on an OLED

AI prices are simple to disregard once they dwell behind an online dashboard. An ESP32 can flip Claude API consumption into one thing bodily: a small OLED show displaying at this time’s spend, token utilization, the most-used mannequin, and progress towards a month-to-month price range. Anthropic provides organization-level usage and cost APIs, together with a cost-report endpoint that returns each day price buckets in US {dollars}.

Even for those who’re not utilizing Claude’s API, you’ll be able to present your common Claude Code utilization. I made a decision to repair this by making a small devoted dashboard that confirmed my utilization limits, so as an alternative of clicking round or typing in instructions, all it takes is a look to see the place I’m at. I additionally determined so as to add a temperature sensor so the dashboard also can present my workplace’s ambient temperature and humidity, which I can pipe into my Home Assistant dashboard to arrange automations for my air conditioner.

Room-level presence that follows folks, not movement

One BLE scanner per room, tracked by way of MQTT

Basic presence automations know that somebody is residence, however they hardly ever know the place that particular person is. ESPresense turns ESP32 boards into Bluetooth Low Energy scanners that estimate the placement of a cellphone, watch, beacon, or tag and publish the outcome by way of MQTT for Home Assistant. With the less complicated setup, one node per room lets Home Assistant affiliate the tracked system with the closest room.

That opens the door to automations that observe folks quite than movement. Music can transfer between rooms, workplace lighting can stay on whereas a tracked watch is close by, and local weather settings can reply to the rooms which can be truly occupied. Bluetooth distance estimates are imperfect, so placement and calibration matter, particularly in small adjoining areas. Even so, room-level consciousness feels a lot smarter than a movement sensor that forgets somebody exists every time they sit nonetheless.

The ESP32 was by no means actually only a networking chip

Purpose-built home equipment beat one other Wi-Fi extender

These tasks nonetheless use wi-fi communication, however none tries to make Wi-Fi quicker. Instead, every turns the ESP32 right into a purpose-built equipment, whether or not that is an outage beacon, thermostat, voice satellite tv for pc, AI spending show, or room-presence node. That is the place the board is at its finest.

It supplies sufficient processing energy and peripherals to work together with the bodily global community, whereas Home Assistant provides the historical past, interface, and automation logic. Start with the undertaking that solves a small each day annoyance, put it in a correct enclosure, and it will probably shortly cease feeling like an electronics experiment and begin feeling like a product that ought to have existed already.