Designing ESP32 Base Shield Board for IoT Application

Abstract

Nowadays, the ESP32 chip's popularity grows that makes it a perfect solution to build an Internet of Things (IoT) application. During the prototype phase, the ESP32 development board can be plugged on top of the shield board to extend its general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins. In this paper, an ESP32 base shield board with onboard LEDs have been designed to overcome the coding and circuit troubleshoot problems among beginners. This proposed shield board consists of the male header pin, which extends all the GPIO pins of DOIT ESP32 DevKit V1 with additional header pins for 5V, 3.3V, and GND. The GPIO pins are connected to LEDs, which function as an indicator that shows either the GPIO pins receive signal 5V (logic 1) or 0V (logic 0). Two sample application are illustrated in the paper. The result showed that the ESP32 Base Shield Board provides easy hardware interfacing and flexibility in connecting the peripheral unit and Node MCU. Its onboard LEDs are not as output only but act as an indicator to know what happens on that pin and make it easy to troubleshoot either coding or circuit problems. This product is a beginner-friendly design, low cost, and reliability for IoT testing prototype and educational purposes.