ESPHome boards

• Overview
• Boards
  • ESP32
  • ESP8266
• Short note on frameworks
• References

Overview

The ESP32 and ESP8266 chips are made by Espressif, and they publish the datahseets online. Different boards (or "dev kits") are made by a variety of manufacturers that source the ESP chips from Espressif.

I have pretty much only been using ESP32/ESP8266 boards with ESPHome so these notes are very ESPHome-centric.

Boards

There are a lot of different chips, boards, devkits and variants there of available¹. Almost all of them are cheap, eBay is a is a good source for buying them but expect them to be shipped from China and delivery times reflecting that.

The board that I have used (and am using) the most is the ESP32 S2 Mini.

ESP32 S2 Mini used in my VINDRUTA project (inside of an IKEA VINDRIKTNING enclosure)

They are very flexible in terms of GPIO pins, and are capable of supporting any of their interfaces on any GPIO port. They are also small and have USB-C connectors.

Typically they cost somewhere around 4-6€/each (but upwards of 10€ if you order from a shop in Germany). Ordering on eBay, the price per unit is lower when you order larger quantities, six boards should cost somewhere around 23€ in my experience.

For the boards that I have used, there is an ESPHome package under packages/boards in my infra repo with configs I use for each specific board. ESPHome uses/wraps PlatformIO and therefore uses the same names and IDs² for the chips, boards and their variants that can be looked up in the PlatformIO board registry.

ESP32

Most (but not all) ESP32³ have Bluetooth (most of those have BLE only), and is the successor of ESP8266⁴.

The ESP32 chips support both the arduino and esp-idf frameworks⁵, though esp-idf is generally preferred⁶.

• NodeMCU ESP32
• ESP32 WROOM
• ESP32 S2 Mini
• ESP32 S3 Pro
• ESP32 C3 Super Mini
• ESP32 C3 MINI-1
• ESP32 WT32-ETH01
• ESP32 WROVER
• QuinLED-ESP32

Some of these boards can be really weird, and I have in general run into more ESP32 boards with weird/unusual/hard-to-read silkscreen markings for the pins for example. Both the BLE and WiFi connections are remarkably stable on the boards I have used.

ESP8266

The ESP8266 chip only works with the arduino framework⁷, and do not have a BLE chip.

• NodeMCU ESP8266
• ESP8266 D1 Mini

These are less powerful than the ESP32 boards, but are sometimes more reliable (getting I²C components to work in particular has been much easier in my experience). Interfaces (such as I²C, SPI, ADC) can only be used on their assigned pins, which can sometimes make it difficult to make a build fit together in a way that makes sense, though that is less of a concern if you can design your own circuit boards with KiCad or something similar.

In my experience, the WiFi connection on the ESP8266 boards is less stable than on the ESP32 variants that I have used.

Both the D1 Mini and NodeMCU boards are available with USB-C, and the D1 Mini in particular is a pleasant form factor.

Short note on frameworks

ESPHome supports the same frameworks as Platform.IO:

• esp-idf⁸
• arduino⁹

In short, ESPHome uses the arduino framework libraries as a middle layer in the stack, so using the esp-idf framework cuts that out⁶. But for some boards, it can be easier to use the arduino framework (for example using I²C on an ESP32 S2 Mini).

ESP8266 only support the arduino framework⁷.

References