I recently had the privilege of joining Hackers at Cambridge, and found myself in an excellent environment to do a side-project. One of the ideas that leapt into mind was to build a robot. But not just any robot: One that could be programmed using just a web browser over a Wi-Fi connection, yet extensible enough to perform more complex tasks in the future.

The proliferation of smartphones has placed a computer in everyone’s pocket. By making the robot programmable using a web-browser, such a platform would be accessible to everyone. In particular, one could learn procedural programming concepts and see their code take immediate, visible effect. The real hurdle in achieving this lies in finding a suitable micro-controller: one that is robust, powerful and flexible, and yet low-cost.

The ESP32 makes a good candidate for the “brains” of this project — it possesses Wi-Fi, BLE, and a host of peripherals — and has 520KiB of SRAM, which is a luxury for someone coming from an ATMega or ESP8266.

I started this project over the weekend, and ran into a multitude of problems. Hardware hacks are difficult to pull off in a short amount of time, since electronics and materials are difficult to acquire at short notice, meaning planning ahead is all the more important.