We kicked off this year with a contest that aimed to promote the various advantages of Espressif’s ESP32, focusing especially on those of the ESP32-PICO-KIT Development Board V4. ESP32-PICO-D4 is a System-on-Chip (SoC) integrating an ESP32 chip together with a 4 MB SPI flash memory in a tiny 7 x 7 mm package. The ESP32-PICO-KIT dev board v4 is a breakout board for this SoC with an on-board USB-to-serial converter for easy programming and debugging.

We received numerous submissions from all over the world, which shows that the international maker community is keenly interested in developing IoT applications with ESP32. The ESP32 Design Contest 2018 finished on March 31st and after due deliberation our judging panel, which consisted of Espressif and Elektor engineering experts, announced the winners at the end of April. The first three winners were:

Grand Prize

• Connected Cocktail Machine: This was a project based on ESP-WROOM-32, aiming to enable ordering cocktails via a mobile phone / PC, IFTTT trigger, or voice assistant (e.g. Alexa, Google home, etc.). With this cocktail machine, not only are users able to order drinks, but they can also have their glasses cleaned afterwards.

2nd Place

• Smart Home Lighting Control: The System of Light Control (SLC) enables users to control up to 24 lighting devices over a local Wi-Fi network, with the combined use of ESP32-PICO-KIT and ESP8266. An Android application is also used for setting up all necessary parameters, e.g. “network name”, “password”, “room/device name”, etc.

3rd Place 

• Wi-Fi BBQ Thermostat and Thermometer: This project was based on ESP32 and its purpose was to monitor installations that need to remain in constant temperature for a long time. The project makes use of low-priced modules which can easily be soldered on a breadboard.

Honorable mentions were given to projects which ranked fourth to tenth: 

 4. ESP32 Game Console  

5. Uroflowmetry Machine for Every Home

6. Electromechanical Decimal to Binary to Hexadecimal Converter

7. Digital Stomper for Guitarists

8. Radiomush, Radiology of Mushrooms, 30+ Years After Chernobyl

9. ESP32 Digital Voltmeter

10.MQTT Weather Station

On behalf of Espressif Systems and Elektor International Media we would like to extend our congratulations to all the winners! We would also like to thank all participants for their high-quality entries. Special thanks are due to our colleagues in Elektor International Media, who worked hard to make the ESP32 Design Contest possible. 

To find out more about the Contest, the winners and all the successfully submitted projects, you can click on here.