ESP32-based development board
ESP32 is often considered a successor to the NodeMCU development board. It is yet another open source board designed by Espressif specifically for prototyping mobile devices, wearable electronics, and IoT applications.
The main upgrade over the last generation chip is a hybrid Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, which can help you provide an additional connection protocol to your application. Note that the ESP32 dev boards have a single antenna, so only one of the two protocols can be used at a given time.
The following figure shows what the development looks like. The form factor is similar to the NodeMCU development board but with some notable differences:
Figure 3.7 – ESP32 DEVKIT V1
We will be using this particular model of the ESP32 board in this book, but the information given here will be also applicable for its other versions as they are all powered by the same chip.
An overview of the ESP32 specifications is as follows...
