What you need
One board, your receiver, and whatever your droid has. Everything except the board and the receiver is optional.
The parts
Section titled “The parts”| Part | Details |
|---|---|
| Board | Freenove ESP32-S3 DEV (FNK0099A): ESP32-S3-WROOM, 8 MB flash, WiFi. |
| RC receiver | Any S.BUS receiver. One signal wire to the board. |
| Sound (optional) | A DY-SV5W, or a compatible DFPlayer-style module such as the DFPlayer Mini, with your sounds on its SD card. Two wires to the board. |
| Servos (optional) | A PCA9685 servo driver board (I2C address 0x40): up to 16 servos on two wires. |
| Lights (optional) | Up to 10 lights: plain LEDs (or a MOSFET driving several), and WS2812 / SK6812-class NeoPixels, RGB or RGBW. |
| WiFi switch (recommended) | A small switch from GPIO1 to GND that turns WiFi on at power-up. See Wiring. |
| A FrSky ETHOS radio (optional) | For the touch-screen button pad. Any transmitter with a multi-position switch can pick buttons. |
You also need a USB cable to install DroidFX the first time, and a phone or computer with a browser to set it up. There’s no app to install and no account.
Limits to plan around
Section titled “Limits to plan around”These are hardware ceilings, not arbitrary choices. LED Configuration shows a live budget and won’t let you go past them.
| Limit | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Lights | 10 | Channel slots. |
| Dimmable at once | 8 | The ESP32-S3 has 8 hardware dimming channels. Plain lights past that are on/off. |
| NeoPixel chains | 4 | Four can be driven at once. |
| Pixels per chain | 150 | Each pixel takes 30 µs on the wire; four full chains of 150 already fill most of a frame. |
| Presets per light | 8 | |
| Servos | 16 | One PCA9685. |
| Sequences | 16 | Each up to 10 minutes, with up to 64 keyframes per servo. |
| Buttons | 45 | 3 pages of 15, like the ETHOS widget. |
Every NeoPixel chain shares one 5 V budget, which you set on LED Configuration. DroidFX estimates what each frame will draw and, if it would go over, dims every chain together rather than browning the board out. The estimate counts NeoPixels only, so leave headroom for plain lights, servos and everything else on the same supply. More in Lights & LED Configuration.