The Color Kit Grande is more than just a simple starter kit for home automation. This kit, which includes an ESP32, a capacitive touch screen, and options for a LiPo battery and 3D-printed enclosure, provides an incredible foundation for building interactive and portable smart home interfaces. When paired with ESPHome and Home Assistant, the Color Kit Grande can control lights, shutters, and other devices, while also displaying real-time data such as temperature, right on its touchscreen.
In this blog post, we’ll explore how the Color Kit Grande integrates with ESPHome and Home Assistant and walk you through the YAML configuration that powers it.
How can you add a button to a device without drilling a hole in its enclosure? This was the challenge I faced when designing the Pendrive S3, as I wanted to use an off-the-shelf USB enclosure. Drilling a hole was an option, but I aimed for the Pendrive S3 to resemble a regular USB stick without any conspicuous buttons altering its exterior.
Exciting news! The German Make magazine has spotlighted our ePulse Feather C6 development board in its latest issue. Join us as we explore this recognition and what it means for the maker community.
Since we launched the ESP32 Color Kit Grande Starter Kit in 2023 it has been a big success. Now we have taken the time to add illustrations to the step-by-step guide to make it even easier for you to assemble.
The ESP32 family of chips never ceases to impress; with just a few lines of code, you can turn an ESP32-S3 board into a WiFi dongle, connecting a host computer to WiFi via USB. Or you can run a script to infiltrate a target computer. Additionally, you can turn it into a memory stick with a WiFi interface.
Displaying your Microsoft Teams presence on Icon64, the ThingPulse LED matrix device, is a great way to let others around you know whether you are available or whether they would be interrupting your meeting.
We are pleased to announce a brand-new app for the Icon64 that allows you to broadcast your Microsoft Teams presence to
Just like Zoom an others, Microsoft 365 family member “Teams” offers a traffic-light style presence to announce your availability . You are either available, busy, away or offline (for real or fake). There are over a dozen different detail states but the traffic-light is usually what counts. Our Icon64 app does exactly this: mapping your presence to the three colors green, yellow, and red.
For once, we did not have to start from scratch when we set out to implement a new app for the Icon64. Instead, we forked the ESPTeamsPresence project by German maker Tobias Blum. While he 3D-printed the case for the electronics, we already had a device. Hence, we only needed to port the software. Thanks to ESPTeamsPresence’s modern foundation – Tobias used PlatformIO – and well-structured code, porting it to the Icon64 was fairly simple. However, while Tobias mapped the Microsoft Teams presence to eleven different color & animation combinations, we opted for sticking to the traffic-light. We felt that your family or co-workers should not have to remember all those eleven combinations to understand how available you are.
A note on security
Your Teams presence is not publicly available, it shouldn’t be. You need to grant the Icon64 presence app permission to access this information. You do so in a simple guided workflow in the browser. It is all described in our documentation. As you will most likely do this in the context of an organization that grants you access to Teams such as your employer or your school, they might want to have a say in this as well.
On the Microsoft side the device is represented by an Azure “application”. It is not an application in a traditional sense (source code and stuff) but a security element for consent management. The application manages the data privileges your device has. It needs access your profile and presence data – and nothing else. You can either use the multi-tenant application Tobias Blum set up, which is the default, or register your own application. Which ever way it is, your organization might have to whitelist that application. The authorization workflow cannot be completed otherwise.
Place the Icon64 next to your home-office door to communicate to your partner or family whether you are available.
The ESP32-S3 is endowed with two noteworthy USB features that its predecessor, the original ESP32, lacked: USB OTG and USB CDC/JTAG. This blog post delves into the platformio.ini settings that govern the USB behavior of the ESP32-S3, with a particular focus on logging in CDC/JTAG mode.
In an earlier blog post we described how to use the ePulse dev board to send messages over ESPNow to achieve ultra long battery life. Now we wanted to test our new development board – the ePulse Feather – with a similar setup.
When was the last time you were thinking about your breathing pattern or the algorithm that forms it (or does the pattern form the algorithm)? I guess it is safe to assume that if your answer is “never” or “it’s been ages” you will be like most readers. Also, if the term spirometry does not ring a bell with you: relax, welcome to the club. Spirometry is the measuring of breath by the way.
