Apart from the fact that sprinkler systems are almost always 24VAC and every commercial sprinkler controller I have ever used or investigated use optocouplers/fets/triacs I don’t really have a good reason to get irritated by homebrew designs that use relays, but I do get irritated. I think the irritation comes from wanting to really learn-by-copying how to design these circuits and many hours searching for exemplars and reading datasheets left me pretty confounded (though most of this was during the great supply chain squeeze so I couldn’t find the right combos of triacs and optocouplers ins stock and the datasheets led me to believe that subbing out a non zero cross would probably be a problem, or not being able to find logic level triacs)

Anyone else have reliability issues with the ESP32?

I have a few of them connected to various wifi networks, and after a couple of years they always seem to disconnect and need a power cycle before they'll reconnect.

I understand they might lose the wifi connection, or their DHCP lease, or there might be interference, or something blasts too many packets at them, or a TCP connection hangs or gets RST... But after any of those, I expect them to recover, reconnect, and continue working. However, even a hello world web server on ESP32 seems unable to do that.

However, it's really hard to track down bugs that only happen once a year when I only have ~10 of these devices.

I don't think there's a D1-ESP32 board? The D1 Mini is Wemos' ESP8266 board. They do have ESP32 boards with the same footprint, but those are not D1 Mini but S2 Mini, S3 Mini and C3 Mini, depending on whether it's ESP32-S2/-S3/-C3.

I thought about making one of these - actually I designed it, but never made the PCB for it - because the internet is full of similar ones: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/195143066807

I have many similar projects. By far, the hardest part for anything I actually want to share is user friendly wifi provisioning. The rest is easy, displays, devices and power supply. (I have 5 different HL-tech radars on boards with 3 different displays, one using LVGL).

I am using the app based Espressive app based provisioning now and it's the best of the lot but still flakey on the Risk V chips like much of the IDF/Arduino wrappers. It's a hard problem.

Most of it works pretty well with the Extensa core so I suggest sticking with those.

I've been playing around with a few ESP32 projects recently and my biggest complaint is that it's hard to get off the ground with even the most basic peripherals. Like, an SD card reader - you need to get your own SPI reader and solder it in yourself.

Maybe I'm just spoiled but it feels like I shouldn't have to go design something on PCBWay.com to get an esp with any memory above the 4MB flash.

Still, really powerful cool devices for their form factor and power needs.

24V AC to me seems like a strange choice when using DC-DC power supplies allows for using any external adapter, including USB PD, without the need for a loose transformer.

You can get ESP-controlled relay boards on aliexpress.

For a classy sprinkler controller, you want 24VAC relay outputs with current monitoring, and you also want a pulse counting input for a flow sensor. Bonus points for rain gauge inputs and some way to collect evapotranspiration data.