The ESP32-S2 powered house-shaped development board is full of convenient ways to start automating your home.
Adafruit has released a Wi-Fi development board to simplify the DIY home automation process. It comes with various quality of life features and color TFT display, and best of all: It's house-shaped!
The new development kit, named FunHouse, comes with onboard temperature, humidity, pressure, and light sensors, and a 1.54" Color TFT display with 240 x 240 pixels for showing data (or anything else you'd like) in real-time.
It's also equipped with three user-assignable buttons, capacitive touchpads, and five "fairy lights" – miniature DotStar RGB LEDs across the top of the house-shaped PCB, along with a socket for a Mini PIR sensor.
Running the show is an ESP32-S2 System on Chip (SoC), which alongside having native USB support, runs CircuitPython, an easy-to-use Python-based library for microcontrollers. More components can be added via three JST PH connectors for connecting Adafruit's vast selection of STEMMA add-on boards and a single STEMMA QT port for I2C connections.
In short, this board combines many of the things you need to get started with DIY home automation right out of the box in a beginner-friendly package. The FunHouse Wi-Fi Home Automation Development Board is available from the Adafruit Store for $34.95.
Adafruit has managed to squeeze much of what you'd find in a home monitoring setup into a single board:
We are no strangers to DIY home automation projects, but most of them take some setup, electronics know-how, and a list of components. Much like most of what Adafruit does, the FunHouse takes a well-known concept – DIY Home Automation – and makes it accessible to non-engineers and curious beginners. There are similarities here with the MorphESP 240, another ESP32-S2 based dev board with a screen.
The differences come with the way Adafruit has designed the board. Where the board from Morpheans is open-ended and designed for developers and tinkerers to extend using their own designs, the FunHouse is designed to be modular and solder-free.
For those looking to start adding DIY tech to their home, the combination of snap-in connectors and easy-to-understand CircuitPython syntax makes this a great learner board. Christmas might be a long way off, but this is prime gift territory.
Ian Buckley is a freelance journalist, musician, performer and video producer living in Berlin, Germany. When he's not writing or on stage, he's tinkering with DIY electronics or code in the hope of becoming a mad scientist.
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