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...
Temperature Monitoring added Now temperature sensor data is view-able from the web interface, LM35 attached to arduino senses the temperature. Once the status update request send from the router to arduino in a given interval, Arduino replies with the pin status and sensor data. That data can be stored in a Lite DB for further use or to draw the graph on the web GUI. Currently it is displayed on the GUI for testing purposes.