Custom ESP32-S3 development board — professionally manufactured by JLCPCB. A far cry from where it all started. It Started in a School Science Lab — Around 1998 Most people who get into electronics start with a kit, a tutorial, maybe a breadboard and some LEDs. I started by sneaking ferric chloride out of a school science lab to etch my first PCB. That was around 1998. I was living in the Maldives — a small island nation in the Indian Ocean — where there was no electronics supply chain, no maker community, no local PCB fab. Just a chemistry cabinet at school, a copper-clad board from somewhere, and a lot of curiosity. This post is about what the next 25+ years of PCB prototyping looked like from there. The early wins with proper chemicals, the years of improvisation when those chemicals disappeared, the real injuries, the failed boards, and finally — the moment JLCPCB changed ever...
After bricking one router i decided not to try to increase the storage and go with the capabilities which it already have. TL-MR3020 from TP-LINK have a UART but the problem with interconnection was TL-MR3020 out puts 3.3v and Arduino UNO is 5v. So after trying couple for methods trying to level the serial data voltage, finally 74LS04 is used the step up the TX from router to 5v and it was success and Arduino see the data. Then tried to run a shell script from a webpage run in web server inside the router. After couple of frustrations i manage to run with html+javascript...thats a long story... Anyways it works perfectly and more mods will be done soon.