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I bought an Adafrut Huzzah32 ESP32 for an IoT project. When the ESP32 arrived, I attempted to fit it into my existing breadboard, but I immediately noticed that no matter how hard I pushed, the pins wouldn't fit into the solderless breadboard.

I tried to find others with the same problem with no luck, so I went on amazon and purchased another breadboard (an Elegoo 830 tie-points Breadboard). It arrived today and I'm having the exact same problem. I don't want to use a soderable breadboard at this stage of the project as I'm just starting, but I don't know what else to do at this point.

I've Googled images of other peoples' setups and there pins are snug down in the board. What am I doing wrong? I've included photos below:

Level View of Breadboard enter image description here

As you can see, the power module on the end fits fine but the ESP32 won't go down into the board. At this point, I've tried two different boards (one of those small Arduino ones and this one) with no luck.

Any suggestions?

You can see that the pins aren't even close to being down in the board.

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    It requires quit a bit of force to push them into the breadboard. Imaging the force of just a single pin, and then multiplying that force by 24. Another solution is to try and see if you can push them in some female headers. And then push those female headers in the breadboard.
    – Gerben
    Commented Aug 12, 2019 at 18:43
  • @Gerben given that the pins on the MCU point down, can you elaborate on how this would work? The benefit of the breadboard is that it sits in a semi sturdy manner while what I’m picturing you describing would have wires coming out the bottom of the MCU, which would be sitting on top of the the wires on my desk. A photo of what you mean would help heaps, thanks!
    – Brandon Avant
    Commented Aug 12, 2019 at 21:26
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    Are the pins properly aligned above corresponding holes?
    – chrisl
    Commented Aug 12, 2019 at 21:39
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    I mean these adafruit.com/product/2830 . Put the huzzaa in the female end, and put the male end in the breadboards. The legs on these headers are a lot thinner than the pins on the Huzzaa.
    – Gerben
    Commented Aug 13, 2019 at 14:06
  • @Gerben, thanks. That makes sense. I will give this a try later today.
    – Brandon Avant
    Commented Aug 13, 2019 at 14:08

3 Answers 3

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I ended up taking Gerben's suggestion from the comments and ordering the stacking headers (adafruit.com/product/2830) and plugging the ESP32 into that. The reason it works is because the stacking headers (as Gerben mentioned) are thinner and fit down into the breadboard while the female ports on top are big enough for the male pins coming out of the ESP32.

Thanks everyone!

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I understand. These breadboards are pretty difficult to work with. Not only fitting an ESP-32 or similar board is difficult, these breadboards are not broad enough to expose all the GPIOs on both the sides.

I had solved this problem in this video. Do have a look. It might be helpful

https://youtu.be/CQlbE1x2i2g

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  • I think the problem they're having really is just the pain of physically inserting the module into the board. I'm not sure this addresses that, not directly anyway. That said, it is nice what you're doing there. When it comes to an answer that's basically a video link, it would help to have something more in the answer, e.g. a still from the video showing the arrangement you've built, so the answer is not entirely dependent on the link.
    – timemage
    Commented Apr 30, 2021 at 4:45
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or you can simply fit two bread boards together and mount the esp on them

enter image description here

(i had to twist the pins a little bit )

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    Sharing between breadboards halves the force required to push the device into a single breadboard, and also exposes more tie-points per device pin. Good idea.
    – Dave X
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 15:57

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