Media - esp32 - Page 1 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of a quite nondescript display that has the blue edges of the circuit board it's mounted to poking out a bit from each side. (It still has the protective film over the display which is why the display itself looks a bit crap.)

My next little project has arrived! This is an ESP32 microcontroller attached to a 7" touch-capable display that I'm going to attempt to use LVGL with to consolidate the two Raspberry Pi Zero Ws that display our lounge room temperature/humidity/power dashboard clock, and the ESP32 that gives us a visual indication via LEDs of what the outdoor dew point plus outdoor and indoor air quality is.

Posted on 4 March 2026, 18:04

A photo of the small square fluro green box that is the Sensiron SPS30 air quality sensor, plus the cables that plug into it. There's also a small square circuit board in a little plastic ziplock bag (the air quality sensor), and a folded-over set of 40cm-long female-to-female cables.

I've had a Plantower PMS5003 air quality sensor running outside to measure the PM values for a few years now, I already had to replace the sensor a couple of years ago and now the current one is dying too. I figured there had to be alternatives to that specific sensor, and it turns out the company Sensiron that makes the so-far extremely excellent SHT30 I'm using for temperature and humidity outside also make an air quality sensor. I ordered one and it arrived today, so that's yet another project to add to my list. 😅

I also bought another indoor air quality sensor that measures TVOC and eCO2 to put into the back room to see how dreadful the air quality gets when I'm airbrushing in there.

our house diy darkroom esp32

Posted on 16 January 2026, 10:43

A photo of seven ESP32 microcontroller circuit boards sitting on a table. The one on top is the old one and is about 5cm wide and 2cm tall. Underneath it are six of the new boards, each of which are about 2.5cm by 2cm or so. The new ones are ASTOUNDINGLY more compact than the old one.

I'm modernising my ESP32 setup! 🎉 The one on top is one of the old Adafruit HUZZAH32s I'm using at the moment that originally came out in ~2017 and has 520KB RAM, 4MB flash, and a Micro USB connector. The new ones are Adafruit QT Py ESP32s with 2MB of RAM, 8MB of flash, and USB-C.

I have a bit of functionality in my MicroPython code where I can trigger the board to update itself remotely by pulling the files down from GitHub, but unfortunately with the overhead of running MicroPython plus my code itself, I only end up with about 80KB or so free after a fresh reboot and so the update-from-GitHub code frequently runs out of memory and I end up needing to update the code by plugging it directly into the computer. (Which in turns means needing to find out a damn Micro USB to USB-C adapter or cable because all my computers are USB-C now.)

The actual physical cable setup with the old boards is pretty messy too, because even though my sensors are all using the nice compact and clean Stemma QT connector, I have to break those out into individual power, ground, SCL, and SDA cables and plug them individually into the GPIO pins on the board whereas the new QT Py boards have a built-in Stemma QT port on them!

our house diy darkroom new toys esp32

Posted on 21 January 2025, 15:42

My sensor-activated Raspberry Pi e-ink display setup for the back room is aliiiive! 🎉 AND I managed to write the Raspberry Pi code fully in Python as well. 💪🏻

The ESP32 polls the distance sensor every 50ms and checks to see if the distance read is less than a given threshold (the distance from sensor to floor is about two metres, so I set the threshold to trigger at 1.5m so it'll go off if someone walks through the doorway). If the threshold is breached, it'll send a message to an MQTT topic with a payload indicating that the sensor was triggered and will not send any more messages even if the sensor is triggered again within a user-specified period of time. Once that same user-specified period of time has passed with the distance threshold NOT being breached, it'll send another message to the MQTT topic saying the sensor is no longer triggered.

On the Raspberry Pi side of things, my Python code listens to the MQTT topic that the ESP32 is publishing to, and if it receives a "triggered" message, it checks to see if the display is already on and being updated and will turn it on and start updating every minute if not. Once it receives a "not triggered" message, it'll clear the display so it's effectively "off".

In the video, I set the trigger ignore period to ten seconds which is why it turns back off so quickly, but in ordinary use I have it set to an hour.

I am by no means a professional Python developer, but if you're curious, the code is on Codeberg (ESP32 and Raspberry Pi)).

our house raspberry pi diy darkroom video esp32

Posted on 7 January 2025, 14:08

A photo of our extremely ghetto "weather station": it's a piece of wood attached to the outside of our back room with a tupperware over the end to protect the sensors from direct rain. The new sensor is dangling down underneath the tupperware and looks almost like it has a microphone on the end of it (it's actually the weatherproofing mesh).

It's aliiiive! I might need to reposition it a little, but I'm fairly sure that it shouldn't be getting any direct sunshine where it's dangling there because there are a bunch of trees just over to the right on the other side of the fence.

I'm quite pleased with the overall architecture of my code for this whole project, it was delightfully straightforwards to find a library for the sensor and integrate it.

our house diy darkroom esp32

Posted on 24 August 2024, 12:53

A photo of the box of the Dune 2 Blu-ray and a Pimoroni "HyperPixel" four-inch display, plus the new temperature sensor which consists of a coiled black cable with almost what looks like a silver microphone cover at the end of it where the sensor lives.

New goodies! Dune Part 2 in 4K HDR, a replacement screen for one of our Raspberry Pi-attached dashboards, and a different type of temperature/humidity sensor, the Sensiron SHT-30, that's actually got a weather-proof mesh around it and is specifically designed for outdoor usage.

(Our current BME280 it turns out is not, and despite being protected from direct rain, the humidity after it rains gets high enough that the sensor gets saturated and all the readings end up being wrong. I also found out that you can actually calculate the dew point if you have the temperature and relative humidity so I don't even need the BME280 to do that for me! The only thing that I'll be missing is the atmospheric pressure, I COULD leave the BME280 attached for just that but but I don't actually know that I care all that much about it tbh.)

our house raspberry pi darkroom esp32 dune

Posted on 21 August 2024, 14:35

A photo of two small black cube-shaped objects with a vertical slot cut out of the front of them. The one on the right has a larger slot which is holding a blue circuit board with three bright LEDs lit up in blue, green, and yellow. The one on the left has a smaller slot which is holding a smaller circuit board (the ESP32) with a USB-C port on one side of it. (The holder on the left is showing what's on the back side of the holder on the right.)

There are three short wires looping out to connect from the ESP32 on the back to the LED module on the front.

I still need to write up a full blog post about my latest ESP32 adventures, but suffice it say they've consisted of indoor air quality sensors, RGB LED modules, teeeeensy little ESP32 boards, and my very first 3D-printed things!

From top to bottom, the LEDs show the outdoor dew point, outdoor air quality, and indoor air quality (or office air quality for the other one), where blue is good and it goes through the spectrum to red is bad, and on the left you can see the back side of the holder where the ESP32 lives. I used Tinkercad to design and print the holders, and got a friend to actually print them out. The first ones didn't QUITE fit the LED boards so I had to go back and slightly tweak them, and the second round was a great success. I airbrushed them black because the resin he used was this weird pale almost-flesh colour that looked terrible, haha.

our house diy darkroom esp32 3d printing

Posted on 29 May 2024, 21:22

A photo of a small microcontroller circuit board sitting above a window, with a bunch of wires messily coming out of it.

The ESP32 hacking continues apace, I soldered together a two-into-one ground wire so I could have both the outdoor temperature sensor and the outdoor air quality sensor attached to the one ESP32 board, instead of needing two separate boards! (The boards I'm using have a 3.3V power pin and a 5V power pin, but only one ground pin.)

I also fixed up my MicroPython code because it turns out it wasn't ACTUALLY asynchronous, it only appeared that way. 😬 Until now all the boards that had multiple sensors were checking both sensors at 30-second intervals which masked the problem, but while the temperature sensor is checked every 30 seconds, the air quality sensor is only every three minutes. The end result was that the temperature sensor would be read, 30 seconds later the air quality one would be, and then three minutes later the temperature sensor would be read again, then after another 30 seconds the air quality sensor again, etc. Oops.

our house diy darkroom esp32

Posted on 22 May 2024, 11:29

A screenshot of a Grafana dashboard showing a gauge panel with the air quality index at 3 (it ranges from 1-5, 1 being good and 5 being very bad), and two spark graphs showing the equivalent CO2 (currently 761 parts per million) and the total volatile organic compounds readings (currently 258 parts per billion).

My ESP32 hacking has continued and I've updated my code to support the ScioSense ENS160 indoor air quality sensor! It measures eCO2, total volatile organic compounds, and gives an air quality index value based on those two readings.

Given that you can daisy-chain I2C devices to connect more than one to a single board, I also changed how my sensor reader repo works and now you can specify multiple sensors and it'll read from all of them and send each reading to a different MQTT topic. So now we have the BME280 temperature/humidity sensor AND the ENS160 air quality sensor hooked up to the ESP32 in the lounge room, and of course I've added a section on my Grafana dashboard to display the data. 😁

My next stop is to bodge together some wiring so I can use the outdoor (nice STEMMA QT connector) BME280 sensor on the same board as the outdoor (standard pins, not I2C) PMS5003 air quality sensor, and not have to have two separate ESP32s for the both of them.

diy screenshot nerd shit esp32 grafana

Posted on 27 April 2024, 21:59

A photo of two large hardcover books, "The Art and Soul of Dune" and "The Art and Soul of Dune Part Two", and a plastic box with a "PiicoDev Starter Kit" sticker on the front showing several small blue circuit boards connected together with wires (it contains a bunch of sensors and wires and bits to do MicroPython electronics projects with).

Birthday goodies!

books our house diy darkroom presents nerd shit esp32 dune

Posted on 20 April 2024, 10:17