Between their dirt-cheap prices, terrific support for sensors, and minimal OS overhead, microcontrollers are a rock-solid choice for automation, circuitry, robotics, and other budget-friendly DIY projects where you might need real-time control over all the peripherals. While different MCU families have their own perks, the ESP32 lineup reigns supreme when it comes to sheer performance and connectivity options.

ESP32 gizmos, in particular, are useful for smart home nuts like yours truly, as they can be used for everything from Bluetooth proxies and e-ink dashboards to reliable network scanners and sensor nodes capable of triggering complex automation rules. So, it shouldn’t sound weird when I say I’ve got a bunch of ESP32 MCUs in my arsenal, including tiny system-on-chip boards. Unfortunately, keeping track of all the projects I’ve configured across my ESP32 collection started to feel like a challenge, and I’ve even had cases where I accidentally flashed the same MCU twice or wrote data on the wrong gizmo (and caused the trigger-action rules associated with it to fail).

However, I recently came across ESPHome, a tool designed to help tinkerers manage their microcontrollers, and it has been a lifesaver for my DIY projects.

ESPConnect can create a detailed profile of ESP32 boards

And it’s compatible with a bunch of MCUs from this family

At first glance, ESPConnect’s web UI seems a bit reminiscent of ESPHome’s: it has a baud rate setting alongside a connect button that, when clicked, lets you choose the ESP32 microcontroller attached to the PC. But that’s where the similarities end. Once ESPConnect performs the handshake operation, it generates a detailed hardware profile of the ESP32 board, including everything from its MAC address, embedded memory details, and clock speeds to security info, peripherals, and documentation resources.

I’ve tried pairing ESPConnect with a bunch of microcontrollers, including multiple instances of the OG board and an ESP32 C6, and it worked well in every case. Heck, I even managed to pair it with the likes of a CAM module, even though it’s technically not on the list of compatible hardware. That said, I couldn’t get ESP8266 and non-ESP32 boards hooked up with the app, though I guess that is to be expected.

As for the setup aspect, deploying the app was fairly simple on Proxmox. Once I'd pasted the bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/community-scripts/ProxmoxVE/main/ct/espconnect.sh)" command in the Shell tab of my PVE node, I chose Default Options for the LXC and waited for the script to work its magic.

Its partition management provisions are top-tier

It can even flash firmware and back up entire file systems

While ESPConnect’s hardware profiling capabilities are fairly helpful, the real fun begins once you check out the other sections of the app. The Flash Tools section, for instance, lets you modify the offsets and lengths of different ESP32 partitions, and it can even write entire firmware binaries to microcontrollers. I use it in tandem with the Partitions tab, which generates a neat layout of all the partitions, so I don’t end up with a broken MCU after I’m done with my firmware tweaks. But ESPConnect can also download the existing partitions and create flash backups, and the latter is especially helpful when I want to clone an ESP32.

ESPConnect can read the contents of the SPIFFS, LittleFS, and FATFS file systems on my ESP32 boards, and I can toss files into the partitions, download the existing configs as backups, and restore partitions via their backup images. There’s also an NVS Inspector for non-volatile storage partitions, but it doesn’t support write operations. Nevertheless, it’s still pretty useful for checking namespaces, accessing key values, and decoding integer data types on these partitions.

The serial monitor is just as useful for quick troubleshooting

While the session log maintains a history of my misadventures

Besides the partition management utilities, ESPConnect also has decent debugging provisions. The Serial Monitor section, for example, pulls the UART log files into the web UI, though it does make the bootloader inaccessible while it’s connected to the serial console. It can even execute commands directly on the ESP32, but I mostly use it to check the logs (and pass them into my local LLMs for some troubleshooting advice when things go south). Likewise, ESPConnect also keeps a record of the flash operations, backups, and (most importantly) system warnings accumulated during my ESP32 misadventures in the Session Log, which is pretty handy for tracing botched experiments.

But it ain’t the only self-hosted tool for my ESP32 experiments

I tend to use my ESPConnect instance in tandem with the ESPHome server running on my Home Assistant node. The latter is my go-to platform for building smart gadgets out of ESP32 MCUs, especially since it lets me toss YAML configs on my pint-sized tinkering companions over Wi-Fi. And when I need to clone a board or look into the partitions after messing up a project (which happens more often than I’d like to admit), ESPConnect has got my back.