I have worked with different popular IoT boards, arduino, esp32, edison<links>, RaspberryPi. Sometimes trying things myself, other times helping others. I can figure out things on the code side of a project but often I will get stuck debugging the hardware. This has specially blocked me from doing anything beyond basic hello world examples.

A couple of months ago, I picked up an esp32 again. I was able to source some components from a local shop. ESP32, Battery, a charging IC, a Relay, LEDs different resistors and jumper cables. I started off with the simple LED blinking example. I Got that working fairly quickly. Using examples I was able to connect ESP32 to a wifi and control the LED via a static web-page<link-to-example>. Everything was working, documentation, hardware, examples. This was promising and I was getting excited.

Next, a friend of mine, Shiv, he is good with putting together electrical components, brought an LED light bulb. And we thought, lets control it remotely with esp32. We referred to Relay switch connections, connected jumper cables and confirmed that with esp32 the relay LED light bulb would flip when we controlled the light over wifi. It was not working consistently, but it was working to a certain level. Shiv quickly bundled everything inside the bulb. He connected power supply to charging IC and powered the ESP32. We connected relay properly. Everything was neat, clean, packed and ready to go. We plugged in the Bulb and waited for ESP32 to connect to Wifi. It was on, I was able to refresh the webpage that controlled the light/led. So far so good. We tried switching on the LED bulb, nothing. We tried couple of times, nothing. On the webpage I could see that state of light was toggling. I didn't have access to serial monitor. I could not tell if everything on ESP32 was working. And I thought to myself, sigh, here we go again.

We disassembled everything, laid all components flat on the table. I connected ESP32 to my system with USB cable. Shiv got a multimeter. We confirmed that pins we were connecting to were becoming HIGH and LOW. There was a LED on Relay, it was flipping correctly. We also heard a click sound in Relay when we toggled the state. And still the behaviour of LED light was not consistent. Either it won't turn on. Or if it turned on it won't turn off. Rebooting ESP32 would fix things briefly and after couple of iterations it would be completely bricked. In logs everything was good, consistent the way it should be. But it was not. I gave up and left.

Shiv on the other hand kept trying different things. He noticed that although the PIN we connect to would in theory go HIGH and LOW. But the LOW didn't mean 0. He was still getting some measurement even when ping was LOW. He added resistors between the ESP32 pin and Relay input. It still didn't bring the LOW to zero. He read a bit more. *AND he added a LED between ESP32 and Relay: Voilà*.

LED was perfect. It was behaving as a switch. It takes that 3.3V and use it. Anything less, which is what we had when we put ESP32 pin to LOW, LED would eat it up and not let anything pass through. And connected on other end, Relay started blinking, clicking happily. What a nice find. Shiv again packed everything together. When we met again the next day he showed me the bulb and said, "want to try?". I was skeptical, I opened the webpage, clicked on "ON" and the bulb turned on. Off, the bulb was off. I clicked hurriedly to break it. It didn't break. It kept working, consistently, every single time.