I found this cool little ESP32 with a built in color LCD. It's a nice little launching platform for my Webthings controlled WS2812b LED lights. I've spent a little time with it and it's really pretty easy to use. However, this little project is reminding me of how much I have forgotten about C++.
And how much I dislike .h files!
But despite that, I have a semi-functional start! For the captive portal, I used ESP_WiFiManager. Following the examples, I was able to get the little thing to attach to my wifi. Nice. One task down.
To work with the LCD, I used the TFT_eSPI library. I just had to find the right config file to use and just worked! This is going really well! Even if I am only filling the entire screen with a solid color.
And then I hit a little bump.
I went to pull in the Webthings Arduino library and i started to get conflicts with the Wifi package needed for the WifiManager. In a cursory look, making the two packages work together seemed like a bigger task than I wanted to bite off right now. That seemed to leave me with 2 options. Option 1, attempt to use the BLE capabilities of the ESP32 to set up the wifi. It is certainly possible, in fact, I've done it before in my professional career, but I didn't want to write an app as part of this project as well. Option 2, hard code the wifi creds into the project and remember to take them out before I commit anything. I'm going with option 2. Wish me luck.
With my ESP32 on the network and the Webthing Arduino library installed and configured, I finally have a custom WebThing on my network that I can control with the WebThings Gateway. This is so cool!
Now to hook up some LEDs.