ESP32 boards - anything to watch for

It is hardware and it is sort of OEM related. I have been looking at ESPHome and realised it has native support for the temperature sensors I have. The BLE data via the RaspberryPi is a bit erratic and the Pi locks up when one of the BLE calls is made (obviously a blocking call in the NodeJS library).

So I thought I’d send for an ESP32 board from China - no hurry!

I know to watch out for the WEMOS D1 and make sure you get a genuine one. I wonder if it is the same for the ESP32 boards and if so any recommendations?

Why not stick with Wemos?

I now only buy from their shop having had a number of so called Wemos boards that are clearly copies. Look under a magnifying glass and you can see the difference in quality.

I have never had a problem with a genuine board. Cannot say the same about the others.

For some reason I thought they were only ESP8266. I see they do an ESP32 so yes, that is what I’ll do.

Cheers

@ian, what do you use for power supplies?

I have a 24V DC bus in the office and workshop. It has 200ah sealed batteries. It was charged by a 960 watt PV system but I recently switched the panels to a grid tie system. I now charge the battery with a Victron Bluepower 5amp charger. This can be used as a 24V power supply without batteries but as I had the batteries I left them in circuit. I use these for 5volt.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07CYY7H7M/ref=oh_aui_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 and these for 12volt.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07CZBQ665/ref=oh_aui_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

For other voltages I use adjustable power supplies from chinese suppliers on ebay. Had a few duff ones but they usually fail immediately and at the price I can live with that. I used to use power supplies from https://www.dimensionengineering.com. Rock solid but expensive. All my network hardware is powered from this 24V as are my emoncms and nodered servers. It is effectively a home built UPS. We do get occasional power cuts and its nice to carry on working when the grid goes down. The only issue I have had was when I also powered outside LED lighting from the 24V. I had network issues and I finally tracked them down to very short sharp voltage drops as the LEDs came on. I fitted an old mains DC power supply to the lights so I didn’t have to rewire them. Using a Sonoff plug with tasmota modifying the Nodered controls was trivial.

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