Dreams to reality - My Sponsorship Story with Espressif

A trip to the past

27th April 2025, that’s the day I started the club with help of my friends, VEDA - VLSI & Embedded Design Association, after typing letter after letter addressing HOD of our department (Electrical and Electronics). I had this urge, this stupidly strong urge, to do things people wouldn’t dare to attempt, and still today that same urge is very much alive. As Albert Camus said “I rebel therefore I exist”.

I’ll make a seperate blog talking about VEDA.

Reality kicks In

We as a club were not resourceful, didn’t have any hardware equipments, boards and books, we couldn’t ask college to contribute, this was a student led initiative, if the college enters the picture, we’ll be held accountable for every component we break, short-circuit & burnt resistors while we tinker. I wanted my club members to break things, Because that’s the only way I know how to learn.

If you have ever opened up a device just to see what’s inside, or taken apart something that was working perfectly fine, to see the heart of the machine, then you know exactly what I mean.

So I started contacting every company I know, started sending them emails, still sending, many didn’t sponsor, many didn’t reply and some cared, and among them is Espressif and Raspberry Pi Foundation.

How it Began

I wrote an email to Espressif regarding my situation and talking about the club, I was in-experienced but this approach made Raspberry Pi Foundation sponsor me 4 Raspberry Pi 5 boards, 2x Raspberry pi 5 4GB model & 2x Raspbeery pi 5 8GB model. I thought, It will atleast take a week to get a reply from them, but I got a reply on the next day, September 10th, 2025, and it read something like this;

Reply from Espressif

Honestly Speaking, I don’t know ABC’s about ESP32, the only thing I know about them is that they are faster than Arduino or other micro-controllers in the market, and they have wifi and bluetooth capabilities which can help me to get real time tracking things, readings, and a lot more. But the real question was, what model do I choose. I searched, watched alot of Youtube videos, read alot of websites then came to conclusion to get 2x ESP32-S3-Devkit & 1x ESP32-C3-DevKit, why? because the C3 one was based on RISC-V, so had to get it.

Then on the other end Jocelyn Zhang, agreed to send me ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1-N8R8 & ESP32-C3-DevKitM-1-N4X, I was ready to accept any used, banged up boards, because I am desperate, didn’t think they would send such beauties.

There was a huge blunder with customs clearance from UPS, but they went above and beyond even covering it, but it was too late because of the China’s government holiday, so she really got back to me after returning back from the holidays, but the parcel sent from UPS was no where to be found, although it displayed it was handed to the resident. Then she sent the parcel again with DHL, thanks to that, I now have these development kits.

They Arrived home!

Aftermath

I dedicate this post to Espressif and Jocelyn Zhang, for believing in a nobody like me. For a big company, sending a few boards might not mean much, but to me, it meant everything. Thank you for supporting a student and his dreams. One day, I hope I can repay your kindness.

I’ll soon share what I build with these boards here.