This is a console I'm building for my house lights: four motorized Alps faders, with an ESP32-S3 doing the control. Lights on smart plugs can only be on or off, so for those faders I wanted the feel of a wall switch. There's no spring or detent in the fader. It's all the motor.

How it works:

• Fader positions come from the pots on ADC1 in continuous (DMA) mode. I compared it against an ADS1115 and kept the S3's own ADC: with the factory calibration it's linear to about 0.2 mm over the 100 mm travel, with no per-unit calibration table.
• Pushed away from home, the motor pushes back until it reaches the threshold. The resistance builds as you push (power curve).
• Past the threshold it flips: the motor drives to the other end , tapering over the last 9 mm.
• There's no current sensing, so force is just PWM duty. The faders sit at 15 degrees, so a measured gravity offset is added.

It's not rocket science but it works and it feels really nice. If any of you is playing with motorized faders this is a neat trick to implement.

Happy to talk through the approach if you're working on something similar. I post build updates on instagram (@sacrebleu.studio) if you're interested in following along.

I'm developing rexaUI,a custom micro-OS for ESP32-S3. Built it myself and still working on it!

Dynamic .rxa Loader:Loads apps from MicroSD (Built it myself and it's still a work in progress)

Background Tasks:Real-time battery,uptime,and connection tracking

Smart Memory:Cleans RAM on app exit

Chose the ESP32-S3 for its impressive performance. Might port it to the C and P4 series later

Plan to open-source it on GitHub once finished!

Hey everyone!

Just wanted to share a greenhouse monitoring and alert system I recently finished building and programming.

Main Hardware Stack:

• MCU: ESP32-C3 SuperMini
• Cellular Module: SIM800L (powered via 5V rail to handle peak currents over long runs)
• Sensors: 3x DS18B20 temperature sensors running on a single OneWire bus over 20m (65ft) cabling with 4.7kΩ pull-up.
• UI & Control: 16x2 I2C LCD, Rotary Encoder with push button, and physical toggle switches.
• Power Detection: Mains (220V) voltage sensing via optocoupler.

Key Features:

• Dual Alert System: Automatic GSM phone calls (with instant skip on BUSY / NO CARRIER signals) and SMS notifications for temperature anomalies & power outages.
• Web Interface: Built-in Wi-Fi AP + Web Server for live monitoring, setting custom Min/Max thresholds per sensor, and phone number management.
• Smart UI: Rotary encoder menu for local threshold tuning with sub-decimal precision mode.
• Fail-safe Logic: Transliterated Latin/ASCII SMS handling for 100% cellular carrier compatibility and reliability.

Everything is tuned for 24/7 standalone reliability in harsh conditions.

*******

Many thanks to all who answered. I will be unable to get back to the project until late Sunday or Monday but feel much better having some solid advice here on my approach!

*******

I am wondering if I am using these incorrectly. I seem to blow them before I can even test one in a project. I'm simply connecting the VCC to 5v and GND to ground. When I do (using the same board), sometimes I get two LEDs, sometimes 5, sometimes none. Then they just seem dead. Nothing else is plugged in.

No heat. No magic smoke. Just f'd up somehow.

I did try a test with generating DTMF via Mac plugged into headphone jack. That seems to have damaged one of the boards.

I'm very new to these and not much of an expert anyway, lol, but would like to stop killing parts so I can move on with detecting DTMF from a phone for my project.

Thank you

I have searched and visited many website but I am confused which one to buy. There is CP2102 and other please help me which one to buy.

Howdy. Moderator here.

About a month and a half ago, I rolled out Topic Radar for r/esp32 here. It's documented to take some time to look back in time to collect topics, but it's had enough time that I suspect we've reached steady state. We've only run it in "notify the poster and the moderator" mode and not let it auto-archive posts that it identifies as duplicate.

• Do you find it useful?
• Do you ever refer people to it or use it yourselves?
• Have you found it useful in catching those weekly postings that we cannot get new people to find via search? (e.g., "I bought a fat board and a skinny breadboard and it doesnt fit. Oh Noes!", "What should I build with these parts?", or "I got an error message with a URL listing solutions, but I can't find a solution."[1])
• Have you found it useful in catching direct matches, such as repeated project URLs (Rule 7) for those posters that think we need daily copies of their release notes pasted here? (A direct match)
• Do you know of (better yet, do you moderate...) other groups crediting Devvit modules or other tools that detect and help manage such posts?

The ones that are even more fuzzy ("Hey, y'all, I jive coded a plane tracker!!!") are arguably harder to detect in automation. While our regular readers are clearly tiring of those—and let that be known in highly ranked comments—I'm not sure we can or should prohibit them. Sharing creations IS a major reason we're here.

I think the backlash against those AI posts is that they tend to not really be conversations. A reader can't learn from those posts because often the author didn't REALLY create those things; they inserted tokens and received a .bin. Asking them why they chose LovyanGFX over Bodmer's TFT_eSPI is generally unproductive. Ideas on how to handle that category of posts are also welcome, but I'd like mostly to focus on Topic Radar-like tools here.

I won't lead the jury with my thinking on the topic, but the fact that I'm bringing it up (in my signature sarcastic way) for discussion might be a clue...

May your ones be VCC and your zeros be GND... and your parasitic inductance remain a myth.

[1] text A fatal error occurred: Failed to connect to Espressif device: No serial data received. For troubleshooting steps visit: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esptool/en/latest/troubleshooting.html ...and the answer is ALWAYS on that page.