The Weekend Hobbyist's Guide to Building an ESP32-S3 Board

Due to their low cost, excellent performance, and community support, ESP32 microcontrollers have been a favorite of makers for many years. Many of us have spent an awful lot of time making things with an ESP32 board, but what about making the ESP32 board itself? That may seem like something that is out of reach for the weekend hobbyist. I mean, that is something that only the most experienced professionals would ever take on, right?

Wrong. As atomic14 demonstrated in a recent project, designing and producing an ESP32 development board is actually a lot easier than building the projects that you’ll make with it. To show the process, atomic14 assembled the bare essentials — an ESP32-S3 chip, a voltage regulator to go from a 5V USB power supply to the 3.3V the ESP32 needs, some buttons, LEDs, diodes, capacitors, and resistors. Since the ESP32-S3 natively speaks USB, no additional circuitry is needed for programming.

In addition to the parts, you will also need a printed circuit board. It is a simple circuit, so once again, even a casual hobbyist should have no problem. And if it is too challenging, you can snag atomic14’s KiCad design. By the time you finish making your board, you will have learned enough to do the job yourself next time.

If you want to assemble the board in easy mode, all you need to do is apply solder paste to the board with a stencil, then set it on a hot plate. If that all sounds like a foreign language to you, then you can also solder the chips by hand — just be prepared for a bit more frustration along the way because some of those pads are quite small. Oh, and as atomic14 pointed out, don’t worry about the pads underneath the ESP32. Soldering those isn’t required, but they will improve thermal performance if that is a concern.

After soldering up the chip, atomic14 flashed it with firmware via USB using the standard toolchain. In a few moments the board was blinking its onboard LED as expected. It really is that easy!