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...
Its been a while i was searching for a cheap wifi module and with the help of smart-prototyping.com , i was able to get a module almost less than USD 5. To connect the module to breadboard for prototyping, i made a small jig to interconnect with the board easily. So i can wire up the device and interface anything to GPIO's. Be careful with the module cause the device it powered with 3.3V and both UART side levels will be 3.3V so i recommend to use a FTDI converter with 3.3V level select.(one i used can select 3.3 and 5 volts) if you connect 5V the module will fry up. If you have 5V or 12V supply to power up the module i suggest to use LD1117V33 to make 3.3V. The stock Firmware in the ESP8266 supports AT commands and for communicating with this need an micro-controller like Arduino. But i want to make a simple solution for that without using external micro-controller. NodeMCU firmware was the best thing i found. To upload the NodeMCU firmware please do a google sear...