From ESP8266 to ESP32

ESP8266, a low-cost microcontroller for IoT and embedded applications, has been a breakout success in the past years.

In September 2016, after a few months of beta testing, Espressif launched the successor of ESP8266, named ESP32: a low-cost, low-power system on a chip (SoC) series with Wi-Fi & dual-mode Bluetooth capabilities.

Key features:

240 MHz dual-core Tensilica LX6 microcontroller with 600 DMIPS

Integrated 520 KB SRAM

Integrated 802.11 b/g/n HT40 Wi-Fi transceiver, baseband, stack and LwIP

Integrated dual mode Bluetooth (classic and BLE)

32 I/O pins with several builtin peripherals

hardware acceleration for security algorithms (AES, SHA2, RSA-4096)

Immediately after the release of the chip, many vendors kicked off the production of different development boards that include the ESP32 chip (or the relative ready-to-use ESP-WROOM-32 module) and everything else is needed to start building an IoT project.

Python on ESP32 in just a few clicks using Zerynth

As already done for the ESP8266 chip, we’ve worked hard to provide the large community of ESP32-lovers a tool to easily develop embedded and IoT applications in Python.

Searching for “Espressif” in the Zerynth Supported Devices page, you now get this boards list (and more are coming in the next months):

In particular, Zerynth supports some of the most widely adopted ESP32 development boards:

ESP32 DevKitC: created by Espressif to evaluate its official ESP-WROOM-32 module. More info here.

created by Espressif to evaluate its official module. More info here. Sparkfun ESP32 Thing. More info here.

More info here. Olimex ESP32 Gateway. More info here.

More info here. Olimex ESP32 EVB. More info here.











Our goal is to let you get right into application design and development without worrying about tedious and annoying setups and configurations.

Unlike other Python implementations for microcontrollers, with Zerynth you can make your board programmable in Python with just a few clicks!

What you DON’T need:

you don’t need to clone any repository from Github or copy/paste scripts from here and there in the web;

you don’t need to drag-and-drop any file in any folder or via FTP;

you don’t need to install Python on your PC (Zerynth installs its own distribution of Python under the hood);

you don’t need “esptool” to flash your ESP32 and you don’t need any binary file;

you don’t need to install Putty or similar software on your PC (Zerynth Studio comes up with its own serial monitor).

What you need:

the only thing you need is to install Zerynth Studio on your PC.

Download it for Free!

Getting Started with ESP32 and Python using Zerynth

Only 3 preliminary steps:

That’s it, now you can program your device in Python!

Zerynth Studio includes a huge list of useful examples at this link that you can clone (aka copy) with just a few clicks.

Let’s start with the “MultiBlink” example

Blinking one LED is known as the “Hello World of embedded devices”… but with Zerynth we can make it funnier. We can blink many LEDs at different frequencies using many separated threads in just a few lines of code.

You can find the “Multiblink” example in the “Examples Browser” panel or you can use the “Quick Search” feature, searching for “MultiBlink”.

Let’s take a look at the code in the “main.py” file. The Python script is very easy: