There’s something unusually exciting about opening the ESPHome Starter Kit. This isn’t just another ESP32 development board. It’s the first official hardware product from ESPHome, which has quietly become one of the foundations of the DIY smart home. That feels significant.
ESPHome is the open-source platform that lets small, cheap microcontrollers become almost anything you want: temperature sensors, buttons, lights, displays, presence detectors, Bluetooth proxies and thousands of other devices. It’s particularly closely associated with Home Assistant, where an ESPHome device can become a native part of your smart home while remaining entirely local.
The problem is that getting from “that sounds brilliant” to your first homemade device has traditionally involved ESP32 boards, jumper wires, breadboards, pin diagrams and at least some acquaintance with YAML. None of it is especially difficult, but collectively it can be perceived as quite a speed bump.
The US$40 ESPHome Starter Kit, designed and manufactured with Apollo Automation, is ESPHome’s answer to that problem.
This isn’t going in the junk drawer
My first impression was simply how solid and finished it feels.
The kit arrives as a neatly manufactured PCB panel containing an ESP32-C6 controller and modules for a push button, temperature and humidity sensing, and a house-shaped “Casita” containing RGB LEDs and a buzzer. A separate PIR motion sensor is included, alongside ribbon cables and a stand.
You snap the individual boards out of the panel and connect them using the supplied cables. There’s no soldering and little opportunity to connect something to entirely the wrong pin and wonder why nothing works.
More importantly, these are not components designed solely for an afternoon electronics lesson. The button feels like one you’ll actually use. The Casita looks good enough to sit on a desk and those super bright RGB LED’s really glow.
That’s pretty unique for starter kits. This I know, I have a drawer full. It’s not a gizmo designed to teach you a few concepts before disappearing into a cupboard. These are proper, fully fledged components, designed to last, keep doing things, and progressively fire the mind with possibilities. I already have several ESPHome devices doing various jobs around the house, so this one won’t be going back in the box either. It’ll be joining the collection.
Training wheels without the wobble
The tutorial is particularly well judged. It uses a familiar wiki-style layout, with each step clearly separated and easy to follow. There’s also an optional advanced path if you want to know about Lambda conditions, and steps to tie the projects into Home Assistant should you feel so inclined. You don’t need to understand YAML either, although interestingly, you’re still exposed to it.
As you add modules one by one, the configuration appears in modular blocks. Add the button and you see its code. Add another component and another block appears beneath it. You can follow what’s changing without needing to understand every line. Rather than being confronted with a wall of configuration, you watch it grow piece by piece.
The other thing I noticed was what didn’t happen.
There was no messing around getting the board connected. Anyone who has used cheap ESP32 development boards will know they can sometimes be surprisingly temperamental. I’ve had Windows refuse to cooperate entirely, forcing me to drag out an old Linux laptop just to flash one. This Starter Kit connected to my Windows desktop straight away. The buttons did what they should first time, and you’d be forgiven for wondering what the fuss was about.
That’s really important. If this is somebody’s introduction to ESPHome, the first ten minutes count. A beginner shouldn’t be diagnosing USB drivers before they’ve even made an LED blink.
Now make something useful
The supplied tutorials cover plenty of interesting combinations: motion sensing, environmental monitoring, buttons and notifications. It gets really interesting when you stop following them.
You won’t be halfway through the tutorials before your brain starts coming up with ways to put this to use. You’re no longer reproducing somebody else’s project, you’re looking around the house, spotting something useful and realizing you already have the pieces to build it.
Then I decided to be unreasonable.
To really put it through its paces and prove it was the real deal, I combined the kit with a camera module hooked into Frigate, my local AI, and Home Assistant, to keep tabs on my dog. The ESP captures and streams the video to Frigate which handles the visual detection, while Home Assistant collects the events. By watching the dog door, I could count how many times she went outside, with the results rolling into a Home Assistant dashboard over the course of the day, and a delightful throbbing LED on the Casita giving me a gentle ‘the dog has gone out’ notification in my office. Excessive? Absolutely. But that’s my local ESP32 doing that!
And now, a beginner electronics kit has become one small part of a much larger local automation system.
That’s really what this kit is teaching: not a few projects, but a way of thinking.
What makes ESPHome unusually powerful is the depth behind that beginner-friendly surface. It has been developed and extended by a large tinkering community, and the list of things you can bolt onto an ESP32 is enormous: displays, relays, microphones, speakers, Bluetooth proxies, web servers, environmental sensors, addressable LEDs, motors, NFC readers and far more besides, including a rather superb pixel clock that has helped me see the back of Alexa.New Atlas reviewed the Kode Dot which started life as an ESP32 project before becoming a commercial product, proving you really can go all the way from beginner to end-product with this very device.
There are ready-made components for a huge range of hardware, and when there isn’t one, the platform is open enough that people routinely build their own. The Starter Kit may begin with a button, an LED and a temperature sensor, but it’s really an introduction to an ecosystem. That’s the clever part. The training wheels come off remarkably quickly, for kids old and young. I’m fairly sure you could get to Mars with a couple of these.
Right, I’m off. I need to print a case for my new dog camera.
