Technology
ESP32 Development
The ESP32 family is our default choice for connected products where Wi-Fi or Bluetooth is the primary link and the bill of materials matters. We build boards around it, write the firmware on ESP-IDF, and take products through secure provisioning and OTA.
What it is
What ESP32 is and when it fits.
ESP32 is Espressif’s Wi-Fi/BLE microcontroller family - originally single-core Xtensa, now expanded through S3 (dual-core with vector-DSP for on-device inference), C3/C6 (RISC-V, cost-optimised), and H2 (Thread/Zigbee variant). All ship with mature toolchains (ESP-IDF, Arduino, PlatformIO), wide community support, and a bill-of-materials cost that is hard to beat for connected products.
We reach for ESP32 when Wi-Fi or Bluetooth is the primary link, the product is cost-sensitive, and the compute headroom of a rich MCU is welcome. We reach past it (to STM32 or Nordic) when the constraint is ultra-low-power always-connected, when radio certification cost matters more than BOM, or when the product needs a dual-radio architecture.
Where we use it
ESP32 Development in shipped programs.
- Smart farming sensor nodes - ESP32 with LoRaWAN add-on for remote deployments
- Building energy monitoring devices - Wi-Fi-connected meters with local dashboards
- AI-adjacent products on ESP32-S3 - low-power keyword spotting and anomaly detection at the edge
Patterns and gotchas
What ESP32 makes easy - and what still needs care.
Do the security setup, don’t inherit the demo. ESP32 supports secure boot v2, flash encryption and signed OTA - but the demo projects often skip them. Every connected ESP32 product we ship has secure boot and encrypted flash from day one; the retrofit later is expensive.
Wi-Fi provisioning is a real design decision. BLE-mediated provisioning is our default (via the ESP BLE Prov library) because it works even when the target Wi-Fi is a hidden network or an enterprise SSID. Softap provisioning breaks in ways that cost support tickets.
Certify the whole radio path, not the module. A pre-certified ESP32 module (like WROOM) simplifies EMC, but the antenna trace, keep-outs and metal near it still change emissions. We treat that layout region with the same care as any other radio design.
Related
How this fits our practices.
ESP32 Development is a lens on our embedded firmware development practice. Adjacent tools and services: IoT development, embedded systems, STM32 development, embedded Linux.
Tell us what you’re building.
Send the constraint that worries you most - a latency budget, a power budget, a certification date. We’ll tell you straight whether we’re the right team.