Forget Houses! Check Out This Gingerbread ESP32 Dev Board

Every year, thousands of people around the globe gather with their families to combine baked goods, frosting, and candy into mostly inedible miniature facsimiles of homes. But while gingerbread houses may have tradition on their side, they don't reflect the interests of every individual. Combining the hobbies of baking and making, Redditor TinkerAndDespair demonstrated their individuality by concocting a gingerbread ESP32 development board that even lights up like the real thing!

The Espressif ESP32 is one of the most popular microcontrollers in the maker community, thanks to its low cost, powerful processor, and built-in WiFi and Bluetooth adapters. If you're building an IoT device, then the ESP32 is a great choice. And as is the case for many microcontrollers today, the ESP32 is available on various development boards that make the chip's features easier to access. In this case, TinkerAndDespair seems to have used a generic ESP-WROOM-32 development board for inspiration.

TinkerAndDespair started by whipping up a delicious batch of gingerbread batter. They then baked that into a large rectangle and coated it in a thick layer of black frosting. On top of that, they added more baked goods, like wafers, to form the structure of components such as the resistors and capacitors. Those components then received frosting coatings of the appropriate colors. TinkerAndDespair even went as far as drawing on silkscreen pin labels in frosting.

But the coup de grâce is the power LED, which actually lights up after plugging in a USB cable. That LED was inserted after baking, with power wires running from a USB port hidden inside the confectionery USB port. It turns out that frosting does a great job of diffusing LED light and this looks fantastic.

We can only hope that TinkerAndDespair will make the gingerbread ESP32 dev board fully functional next year!