Hard to believe how time flies. It’s been 6 years already since we first introduced the wESP32 on Crowd Supply! And it’s still going strong, this little thing that started thanks to all of you backers who helped make it a reality. Thank you!

Hornet Nest Alarm Panel

One of the main reasons the wESP32 is still going strong is that customers keep finding cool uses for the powerful combo of the amazing ESP32 ecosystem, combined with networking and 13 W of power delivered through a single cable.

One such customer is Christopher Greenlee, who created the Hornet Nest Alarm Panel using the wESP32, and he is now launching his own campaign right here on Crowd Supply!

If you are at all into home automation, or have an existing proprietary alarm system in your house, or are thinking of installing one, you really owe it to yourself to check out this project. In fact, just having this piece of hardware available may make you decide to install a security system!

Thanks to the use of the wESP32, the Hornet Nest is fully supported by ESPHome and integrates seamlessly with Home Assistant, the premier open source smart home hub. While proprietary smart home systems keep degrading from bad to worse and may drop support for your hardware at any time, Home Assistant actually keeps getting better and better with every release and puts you in control of your smart home, not some faceless corporation with its own agenda.

wESP32 revision 8

The Hornet Nest Alarm Panel will ship with a wESP32 included, pre-programmed with ESPHome instead of the usual MicroPython, to make your Home Assistant integration as easy as possible. Of course, you can always reprogram it with whatever you want if you want to do your own thing! What’s more, the Hornet Nest will ship with the latest wESP32 revision 8 hardware, which is also coming to all other sales channels (with the usual MicroPython pre-installed) in early 2025.

While the last revision 7 update was a bit of a rough transition before software support caught up (due to the switch to the RTL8201FI Ethernet PHY), revision 8 is going to be a much tamer update. In addition to revision 7‘s high-performance 4-layer PCB, increased decoupling capacitance, the much more reliable RTL8201FI Ethernet PHY and 16 MB of flash, you will now also get a Sparkfun Qwiic / Adafruit STEMMA QT connector, so you can use the wESP32 to create useful sensor nodes without any soldering whatsoever!