ESP ESP-32-S3 Development Board ESP-32-S3 Module with ESP-1-N16R8 Low Power MCU with Dual-Mode Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Type-C Connector Compatible with Arduino

Bought these by mistake, meant to get some seeed c6s. That said, they showed up and were exactly what they were supposed to be. Foam on the headers so nothing was bent. Not tested, but seemed alright.

I haven't gotten to far with these boards specifically but so far it's looking promising. The only problem with these boards is you'll need to download a Chinese USB to UART drive in order to communicate between the ESP32 and your MAC. Even though I'm using a Chinese board ;) I don't really trust the driver, probably being dumb but oh well. If you're using a PC it's pretty plug and play and ready to rock for you. Hope this review helps with MAC troubleshooting.Edit (20250130): Ok, not as plug and play as I thought it would be, but not too bad once you make some adjustments to your code. I saw other reviews that said they had difficulty connecting to WIFI and I had the same problem. From what I was reading it sounds like an Antenna manufacturing problem, IDK. But it's not really a problem once you adjust in your Arduino IDE: #include <esp_wifi.h> into your sketch, then when you call your WiFi just lower the transmission (tx) power to 40 or half of the default with esp_wifi_set_max_tx_power(40);. It seems counter intuitive but seems to work.

Excellent quality and performance.

Although I'm relatively new to Arduino, I do know enough about writing and uploading code to a board. With these boards, I just couldn't get even the simplest, most basic program to upload. I tried adjusting all the settings in my IDE and could not simply communicate with the board. No information came with board so I'm sure I was missing some unusual setup/configuration - maybe installing a new board or library - these boards did not provide any information.I wasn't going to waste anymore time researching about these boards, so I returned them.

I first rated these boards with only two stars. I then updated to three stars because of good customer support. I have since realized that my problem with the boards was some sort of user error. I believe my difficulties were due to conflicting libraries. I updated to five stars because everything seems to work well now.Notes: For Arduino IDE 2 I am using ESP32S3 Dev Module as the board and in order to use the Neopixel, you MUST solder the two contact points together.

I have an M1 Mac and it took me about 3 hours (after 2 hours and 50 minutes trying to find the right drivers/platform io board / ini configuration) to realize I needed to set up a project for esp32-s3-devkitc-1-v8 (which is not this board) from the main options of platform iO and then hold the boot button and press the reset button while holding before uploading. It also had to be on the left port (under the LED) and did not work in the right. I guess not many MAC users use this and I wish I wasn't a mac user because that was extremely painful. However, I did get it to work now and the features + extra space on this chip makes me want to buy some more.

All working fine, no complaints.

Can't keep a wifi connection 3 feet away from the router. Bought the S3 because it was supposed to be better. Trash.