ESP32-S3R8

About two years ago, I got my hands on an ESP32-S3R8 microcontroller, also known as the Lilygo T-Display-S3. I wrote a clock application in TinyGo and… abandoned the project.

Now it’s 2026, and I’m itching to get my hands dirty again. I want to build something more interesting than yet another API/gRPC service—and definitely not another Telegram bot.

If you research ESP32 projects, one of the first things you’ll come across is a Wi-Fi scanner:

package main

import (
	"time"

	"tinygo.org/x/espradio"
)

func main() {
	time.Sleep(2 * time.Second)
	println("Initializing Wi-Fi...")
	if err := espradio.Enable(espradio.Config{}); err != nil {
		println("Enable error:", err.Error())
		return
	}

	if err := espradio.Start(); err != nil {
		println("Start error:", err.Error())
		return
	}

	for range time.NewTicker(5 * time.Second).C {
		println()
		println("Scanning Wi-Fi...")

		aps, err := espradio.Scan()
		if err != nil {
			println("Scan error:", err.Error())
		} else {
			println("Found:", len(aps))

			for _, ap := range aps {
				println("SSID:", ap.SSID, "| RSSI:", ap.RSSI, "dBm")
			}
		}
	}
}

Let’s flash the firmware…

> tinygo flash -monitor -target=esp32s3-generic -serial=usb -port=COM6 .

But there’s also BLE/Bluetooth. I played around with connecting the ESP32 to a bike computer (BC), but that hit a dead end because of its proprietary nature and the lack of API documentation for the bike computer itself. I’m not quite ready to dive into reverse engineering just yet.

I Want a Spider

While browsing the internet, I came across this article about a Six-Legged Spider Robot with Servos and Arduino—special thanks to the author for all the work they put into it.

Here’s what I want to build:

• Three servos per leg, for a total of 18 servos.
• The three legs on the right connect to the right-hand PCA9685, and the three legs on the left connect to the left-hand one. That gives us two PCA9685 boards. I’ll need to do some soldering to change the PWM address-selection jumper.
• The two PCA9685 boards are connected in series: PCA9685 → PCA9685 → ESP32-S3.
• The ESP32-S3 will serve as the motion controller.
• Separate power lines for the logic and power stages.
• An Orange Pi 4 LTS connects to the ESP32 via UART_RX and UART_TX.

CirkitDesigner