The ESP32 is a wireless system on chip that combines a microcontroller core with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, hundreds of kilobytes of RAM and a set of peripherals, at a price low enough to show up in smart plugs, light bulbs, sensors and countless maker projects. Espressif ships it as bare chips and as certified modules with an antenna on board, and provides an SDK (ESP-IDF) alongside support for the Arduino environment and MicroPython.
Variants matter: later family members add Thread and Zigbee radios, RISC-V cores, AI acceleration or a USB interface, while some drop features to cut cost. The platform’s strengths are price, documentation and a large community. Its limits are the power draw of Wi-Fi, which makes a Wi-Fi-only design hard on batteries, and the need to manage firmware quality in a very open ecosystem.
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