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Table of Content
* Introduction
* Hardware: The Circuit
** Components
** Breadboard
** Choose GPIO ports and their board pins
** LED part
** Resistors
** Switch button part
* The Software
** Initialisation
** Main loop
** ISR (Interrupt Service Routine)
** Debouncing
*** ESP timer
↑ Introduction
Update: I wrote this article, following this other one that teach the usage of a potentiometer and an OLED screen..
After ArchLinux upgrade from python 3.9 to 3.10, tools need to be reinstalled by:
cd ~/esp/esp-idf
git pull
git submodule update --init --recursive
./install.sh esp32c3
If you never used ESP-IDF, you can read the previous introduction article to ESP-IDF on RISC-V based ESP32-C3, how to install it and start environment for compiling and flashing code. I also wrote article about using ESP32-C3 with Apache NuttX POSIX OS, but it will be useless here.
This article is about, on ESP32 (more specifically a less than 3.5€ ESP32-C3 based NodeMCU board, but it should work about the same way on other ESP based boards) :
* How to blink an external LED using GPIO, including how to know LED needed voltage (V), amperage (A), and compute needed resistor, by using several possible means.
* Explanations about resistors values colours bands and computation of parallel mounted resistors. I also give link to free and open source software I wrote to help to compute needed resistors (depending on LED type, and desired intensity).
* How to connect an external switch to GPIO, and which resistor is needed. How to receive and manage it’s state a good way. By debouncing physical human pressure on switch, and use software interruption (that’s more easy that it could sounds).
* How to blink included RGB LED and stop/start it by using switch, an asynchronous way.
↑ Hardware: The Circuit
After 20 years without practising electronics and searching some documentation about how to make the circuitry, for the LED and for the button, I found several giving some elements for each part. I finally found some article that give explanations for this board, but using Arduino, and with lot of deep errors. Too strong resistor, not at the good place, after gathering informations of lot of sources and after having made lot of tests and looking back to source, I decided to write a complete tutorial for beginners like me. This could help me to understand again all needed bases when needed, and I hope it will be useful for other people too.
Components
A basic tool to test and learn on circuits is a breadboard, it allow to test without needing to solder anything. It can so also be used by children, as 3.3V powered by 2.4A of an USB 2 or 3 is not dangerous at all.
* We need also a 5mm LED, that can be found on old electronics circuit or are really cheap, we use a red LED that is perfect to represent an ON or OFF state and with 1.8V can be managed by a 3.3V output board.
* We also need a switch button. A cap is more comfortable but not required to make it work.
* We also need a resistor, if you have a 75 ohms (75Ω), or a 100Ω + a 330Ω, that’s perfect, else a 100 ohm alone is just nice, above 100 and until 330Ω there will still have light, but it could not be very bright.
You can also use a 10KΩ resistor for the switch, called pull-up (or pull-down) to have a more perfect signal, but external resistor is not required for this kind of board, as it includes internal pull-up/pull-down resistors, that is more efficient and possible to enable or disable by software with the esp_err_t gpio_set_pull_mode(gpio_num_t gpio_num, gpio_pull_mode_t pull). We will not need to use the Open drain mode, used with SPI, where pull-up/pull-down is used as changing active/inactive signal.
Breadboard
Breadboard is a very convenient board that allow to test circuits without soldering. Any kind of components can be easily inserted and removed, and contact just work. The holes follow the weird electronics standard space of 2.54mm. This is because 2.54 mm is 1 inch of the imperial units, as modern electronics was made in the US, and this is the only one country that still uses this very complex units system. System International (SI), made during French Revolution, is far easier for any kind physics computation.
In brown, electric links hidden inside breadboard
The plastic made board contains underlying electric links. They are divided on three parts, large central part and two side part.
* The two side part are just long line generally used for Ground (GND) and Voltage (V or Vcc). Blue (for GND) and red (for Vcc) lines are drawn to help to avoid to mix both VCC and GND on the same line and so avoid short circuits. Having one VCC+GND backbone one each side is just perfect for microcontrollers that can have both 5V and 3.3V or to have easier access to each side of the board. More efficient boards only use 3.3V.
* In the middle part, electric links are perpendicular to the side ones, separated in the middle, and are used to place electronics components. Some hole counters every 5 holes, and Letter at both extremities of the breadboard are wrote to copy a circuit from a board map an easier way.
Choose GPIO ports and their board pins
Here is the pineout of the board, we need to choose ports used for the circuitry, some pins have GPIO including only digital signal (0 or 1), analog support with analog to digital conversion (ADC) input, or digital to analog conversion (DAC) output. Some pins are to add voltage to electronic components (3.3V ports in RED on the picture) Warning to not connect them directly to GPIO port, you could definitively damage your board..

NodeMCU ESP32-C3-32S-kit pineout
Here is the pinout mapping for NodeMCU ESP32-C3-32S-kit. Drawing, thanks to J-C François.
You can generally found them in the documentation of your board. founding this kind of schemas is not always easy, but they are often provided y board vendors. List of ESP32-C3 SoC GPIO are on the doc, but every board vendors can choose to map or not them on the board pins.
We choose here GPIO 1 (GPIO_NUM_1
in the API) for the button, and GPIO 2 (GPIO_NUM_2
) for the LED. For this specific board, they are respectively second and third pins, on the left side starting from the top.
In the source code, as we will see later:
#define EXTERN_BUT GPIO_NUM_1 // BUTTON on GPIO1
#define EXTERN_LED GPIO_NUM_2 // LED on GPIO2
LED part
We will use here a red LED. LED means “light-emitting diode”, this is so a special kind of diode that emit light. A diode work only in one direction, start at a determined voltage, and shouldn’t be powered over a top voltage to avoid damages. If it is powered in the wrong direction (and not too much), nothing happen.
Diodes (at left) and LED (at right, with arrows) symbols.
Anode leg is longer than cathode one, LEDs put on a flat surface roll by themselves until the flat side it at the bottom.
LED bottom ring is flat at the cathode side
For LED part we need a resistor (most tutorials I seen wrongly say 330Ω one). electronics LED work with different ranges. About 10 to 50mA, using 20 to 30mA is generally safe, but warning, they sometime use less mA. Generally with lower value than 20mA, the LED will not be very bright. Voltage depend on LED colour. Try to keep in the middle of these ranges to obtain enough light but to not burn your LED. The best is to follow the specifications of your LED vendor. That’s hard to found information, values change from one vendor to another one. But due to chemical components generally used (this could change depending on available raw materials), the values are around this :
* IR 1.2 to 1.6V
* Red 1.8 to 2.1V
* Orange/yellow 1.9 to 2.2V
* Green 1.8 to 3.1V
* White/UV 3 to 3.4V
* Blue 3 to 3.7V
* RGB, each colour pin has its own colour voltage, refer to their own colour voltage above (or still best, vendor specifications).
You can test the “Forward Voltage” of a LED with a digital multimeter. Forward because this is the direction where it lights.

Digital multimeter in diode testing position
Select the diode mode of the multimeter (as on above picture), and touch the Anode (longer leg, at the rounded side of the LED base) with the red connector, and the cathode (shorter leg, at the flat side of the LED base) with the black connector.
We use a red LED, that need about 1.8V. The ESP32C3 has 3.3V
output available, so there is a difference of:
3.3 - 1.8 = 1.5V
We need a resistor to avoid an over-voltage of the LED.
Resistors
After Ohm law, U = RI
, where U is voltage (Volt or V), R=resistance (Ohms or Ω) and I intensity (Ampere or A). So :
R = U/I
1.5/0.02 = 75Ω
We choose the nearest resistor, with a resistance equal or above this result.
The resistors are painted with rings indicating their resistance. There is, in general, 4 or 5 rings (or bands). That can be read from left to right as: resistance (2 rings), multiplier (one ring) and tolerance % (1 or 2 rings). Here is a good 5 bands calculators.
A good mnemonic-technique to memorize colours order in English is "Bad Beer Rots Our Young Guts But Vodka Goes Well (in) Silver Goblets
". for value rings they start by 0, then 1, etc..., for multiplier by 1, then 10, etc....
Black | 0 | 0 | x1 | ||
Brown | 1 | 1 | x10 | ±1% | |
Red | 2 | 2 | x100 | ±2% | |
Orange | 3 | 3 | x1000=x1K | ||
Yellow | 4 | 4 | x10K | ||
Green | 5 | 5 | x100K | ±0.5% | |
Blue | 6 | 6 | x1000K=x1M | ±0.25% | |
Violet | 7 | 7 | x10M | ±0.1% | |
Gray | 8 | 8 | x100M | ±0.05% | |
White | 9 | 9 | x1000M=1G | x1 | |
Gold | ±5% |
| |||
Silver | x0.01 | ±10% |
Warning, to the light when you look at the bands, some bands can be confused, and it can have disastrous consequences, especially if that's for the multiplier.

Resistors with flash at left and ambient light shadow at right. As we can see on the light blue resistor at left, the second painted ring is orange, where it seems brown with the shadow of the natural light et right.
If you have some doubt about their value, you can still use a digital multimeter on their resistance position displayed by a greek Omega character (Ω).

Digital multimeter in ohm (resistor) testing mode position
Some suggest 330 ohms with 5V, this is really too much, and even for 3.3V, that result in
1.5/330 = 0.01A = 1mA
1mA is 1/20th of ideal light, this is still light up but with far less intensity.
I have a 47ohms resistor that would result in a too bit too high value:
1.5/47 = 31.91mA
See this video (the difference is visible on the ambient light, as camera focus on the light. Here 330 ohms (resulting to 1mA) and 100 ohms (resulting to 15mA) resistors are connected in parallel, a better solution (see below), and after 330 ohms only, we can see the ambient light change only as phone sensor wasn't in HDR mode. This difference of light means that the LED is not powered enough.
I made a simple resistor calculator tool with TIC80 in Lua. You can use it online on your browser as is use WASM version in linked page, or download it to use on your computer or phone, it's Open Source with GPLv3 license:

Screenshot of resisor_calculator
28 december 2021 update: I discovered after this post that the famous free and open source electronic design suite, KiCad contains a tool called PCB Calculator
that allow to compute lot of electronics related things, including resistors, and has a resistor color table. The version 6.0.0 of Kicad had been released on 25 december and contains several years of work, with huge improvements.
Another Ohm law say that When linking resistors in parallel called "parallel resistor law
", the computation is:
1/R = 1/R₁ + 1/R₂ + ... + 1/R₉ + ...
So
R = 1 / (1/R₁ + 1/R₂ + ... + 1/R₉ + ...)
And we have with 330Ω and 100Ω resistors in parallel:
R = 1 / (1/100 + 1/330) = 1 / 76.744Ω
I = 1.5/76.744 = 0.01954A = 20mA
That's just near perfect.
This formula make everything in one pass:
I = U * 1 / (1/R₁ + 1/R₂ + ... + 1/R₉ + ...)
So here:
1.5 / (1/100 + 1/330)
I also made a simple command line calculator tool for resistors in parallel, available here https://framagit.org/popolon/electronhelp beside the tic80 single resistor calculator. I still need to implement, parallel calculation in tic80 version, and unique resistor calculation in command line version.
Switch button part
For the button, the principle is just a switch, that cut current by default and make a short-circuit when the button is pressed. This switch is on a circuit between one of the GPIO
pin and the ground (GND
) pin. Due to the signal noise, a pull-up/pull-down resistor is needed to stabilize the signal. Pull-up/pull-down resistor is just a very low current that goes out of short circuit current. A 10KΩ resistor connected to the 3.3V pin is used for this. It is called pull-up if the resistor is connected to the button circuit between the button and the GPIO (3.3V too) pin, or pull-down if it is connected between the button and the ground.
Today most MCU boards, including ESP32-C3 include internal pull-up/pull-down resistors. They can be activated by software.
The legs connexion inside switch should be counter-intuitive at first, but legs on the same side are unconnected, each leg is connected with the one on the opposite side. To be clear, on the schema about the pull-up resistor, the two left legs are always connected together and the the two right legs are connected together, the button make the connection between left legs and right legs.
↑ The Software
We want to manage:
* A main loop that blink the RGB LED of the board
* An external red LED that light when blinking is off.
* A switch button, that can at anytime, asynchronously, switch between these two states. This button can't be locked down, so we change state at each time it is push down. Releasing it doesn't have any effect.
To manage all this an asynchronous way, we need interrupts.
* Timer interrupt for waiting between LED blink steps
* Interrupt when on/off switch is pushed down, to change state.
* At this level we need also another asynchronous timer interrupt used for what is called debouncing. When the button is push down, it physically bounds, and the contact is on/off several time. The same effect is produced at the electrical level but the analogue current, is managed by electronic components, we can see at our level the current with just digital logical 1 (on) or 0 (off) state.
There is an included example with queueing in ESP-IDF, but it was not very clear for me about it's goal. After managing the switch, I looked it again, it allow to test queuing and interrupt, just by connecting 2 pins to 2 other pins, two pin send signal, the two other receive it, following by serial terminal output to understand what is running, is also of great value. Anyway, after searching a lot about how to use switch button, I found this topic helped me for the software part but was not complete, especially for debouncing. So I wrote here a working one and how it works. All the functions about GPIO of ESP-IDF are described here.
I made a copy of the esp-idf/examples/get-started/blink
example as a starting project. See the previous article about ESP-IDF for this and how to compile it.
Just copy the blink example, and replace blink/main/blink.c
by my version, that you can download here.
You can as an helper compile and flash it a first time, you will then only have to replace the blink.c
file and compile and flash it again.
To initialise the environnement for an ESP32-C3:
. $HOME/esp/esp-idf/export.sh
idf.py set-target esp32c3
Then to build and flash it (you can only apply build of flash depending on your needs) :
idf.py build flash
↑ Initialisation
Set the state = 1
meaning internal LED will blink and red LED the opposite way will be off.
* Choose used GPIO, reset all GPIO, set LED ones as output, button as input
* Initialise interrupt and timer for button, we set it as POSEDGE
(positive edge), this is the time when the current move up from 0 to 1, when contact link become active inside button.
In the default blink project, the blue intern led is defined as BLINKING_LED
, we instead start from it's internal GPIO, and the same for other internal colours of the internal RGB LED (respectively R=3. G=4. B=5). I use here connector GPIO1
pin for the button and GPIO2
for the external LED (line 19).
#define RED_GPIO GPIO_NUM_3
#define GREEN_GPIO GPIO_NUM_4
#define BLUE_GPIO GPIO_NUM_5
#define EXTERN_BUT GPIO_NUM_1 // BUTTON on GPIO1
#define EXTERN_LED GPIO_NUM_2 // LED on GPIO2
We define a variable called state
with starting state value of 1. 1 = on, 0 = off (line 31):
// set initial state to blinking led on
static int state = 1;
We need to first reset all the pin we use (line 61):
gpio_reset_pin(RED_GPIO); // reset internal RGB LED GPIO
gpio_reset_pin(GREEN_GPIO);
gpio_reset_pin(BLUE_GPIO);
gpio_reset_pin(EXTERN_LED); // reset external GPIO
gpio_reset_pin(EXTERN_BUT);
We then create the timer, by sending to the appropriate function the previously defined structure (line 67).
// create the timer
esp_timer_create(&debounce_timer_args, &debounce_timer);
We set all the characteristics of the button GPIO. Could be set outside of the code, and send it to the gpio_config
function (line 70).
if (ISR_MODE == 1) { // Interrupt mode
gpio_config_t btn_conf;
btn_conf.intr_type = GPIO_INTR_POSEDGE; // Interrupt at Posedge only
btn_conf.mode = GPIO_MODE_INPUT; // Use INPUT mode
btn_conf.pin_bit_mask = EXTERN_BUT_MASK; // MASK of the button pin
btn_conf.pull_up_en = GPIO_PULLUP_DISABLE; //Disable pullup
btn_conf.pull_down_en = GPIO_PULLDOWN_ENABLE; //Enable pulldown
gpio_config(&btn_conf); // send config
} else { // Naive mode
gpio_set_direction(EXTERN_BUT, GPIO_MODE_INPUT);
}
printf("button configured\n");
We now set the interruption associated with the button at the GPIO EXTERN_BUT
to the isr_button_pressed()
handler function (line 83).
if (ISR_MODE == 1) {
gpio_install_isr_service(ESP_INTR_FLAG_DEFAULT); // install GPIO interrupt
gpio_isr_handler_add(EXTERN_BUT, isr_button_pressed, (void*) EXTERN_BUT); //Add handler of interrupt
printf("Interrupt configured\n");
} // end of ISR initialistaion
Then we set the OUTPUT
direction of the LED and change the external red LED to 1 - state
= 0, or off, we don't set the 3 internal LED at off, as they will be set just after, at the beginning of the loop (line 89)
/* Set the LED GPIO as a push/pull output */
gpio_set_direction(BLUE_GPIO, GPIO_MODE_OUTPUT);
gpio_set_direction(RED_GPIO, GPIO_MODE_OUTPUT);
gpio_set_direction(GREEN_GPIO, GPIO_MODE_OUTPUT);
gpio_set_direction(EXTERN_LED, GPIO_MODE_OUTPUT);
printf("LED output configured\n");
gpio_set_level(EXTERN_LED, 1 - state); // 1-1=0 1-0=1
↑ Main loop
In this infinite loop (while(1)
), we basically light one colour of the LED, wait a bit using interrupt, to avoid power consumption, then light off the LED. Some informations bout the current state are send to the serial console like the state of the system (1 internal LED on (1) or external red LED on (0)), and the beginning of the loop.
We choose here to make the loop and to send the state
value to the LED, then to wait, then to change to 0 value the LED to stop lighting it. It would have be better to stop the loop as soon as the system is off, and to wait to be at on again to loop.
The loop start by printing the current state and light off RGB LED (line 98):
while(1) {
printf("starting cycle by turning off the LEDs\n");
gpio_set_level(RED_GPIO, 0);
gpio_set_level(GREEN_GPIO, 0);
gpio_set_level(BLUE_GPIO, 0);
then if we are in naive mode (line 104) without interruption get the state of the GPIO used with the button with gpio_get_level()
function, and in any case display state (line 107). This allow to see if we currently connected the button to the appropriate GPIO pin. We then wait 1 second (1000 millisecond, line 108):
if ( ISR_MODE == 0 ) { // naive mode
state = gpio_get_level(EXTERN_BUT);
}
printf("state=%d\n",state); // display current state on console
vTaskDelay(1000 / portTICK_PERIOD_MS); // wait with lights off
We then light the blue LED, wait 200 milliseconds (0,2 s) and turn it off (line 110):
gpio_set_level(BLUE_GPIO, state); // light on blue if state up
vTaskDelay(200 / portTICK_PERIOD_MS);
gpio_set_level(BLUE_GPIO, 0); // light off blue
Then we do the same with the green LED (line 114), then the red (line 118), and then the red and green at the same time, lighting a yellowish colour (line 122). We wait for the last time of the loop cycle for 200ms (line 124) and the cycle restart by turning off all the LEDs (line 100 above):
gpio_set_level(GREEN_GPIO, state);// light on green
vTaskDelay(200 / portTICK_PERIOD_MS);
gpio_set_level(GREEN_GPIO, 0); // light off green
gpio_set_level(RED_GPIO, state); // light on red
vTaskDelay(200 / portTICK_PERIOD_MS);
gpio_set_level(RED_GPIO, 0); // light off red
gpio_set_level(RED_GPIO, state); // light on red
gpio_set_level(GREEN_GPIO, state);// and green => yellow!!
vTaskDelay(200 / portTICK_PERIOD_MS); // end loop
}
↑ ISR (Interrupt Service Routine)
The function gpio_isr_register()
can be used to register interruption function.
But also gpio_install_isr_service()
and gpio_isr_handler_add()
.
Interrupt allocation. One of interesting aspect to know is that you can keep interruptions in IRAM (Instruction RAM) and use datas in DRAM (Data RAM), allowing less latency in interrupt and keep them independent from flash read/write. About Memory in ESP32-C3), IRAM and DRAM can be read/write in parallel.
↑ Debouncing
This article illustrate the problem of bouncing and 2 methods for debouncing with examples on FPGA, and that's really more simple to implement on an FPGA than on a general purpose microprocessor or microcontroller.
The main app already use the main timer vTaskDelay
, so we can't use it as I first done, else it will change the return address of the function, and so break the main loop. We could create a new xApp, but the more elegant way, is to use ESP Timer, it will solve all our problems an easy way.
↑ ESP timer
We will follow the second one, and use an High Resolution Timer, ESP Timer for this. ESP-IDF include an example in examples/system/esp_timer/
. This is not that we care about high resolution, ms is good enough here, but, this has the advantage to manage the timer by interruption and to easily avoid conflicting call, as this is needed due to bounces.
We need to create the structure to be sent to the function esp_timer_create()
, that initialize the interrupt, and so the header of the callback function must be predefined (line 34):
// button manager with debounce timer definition
static esp_timer_handle_t debounce_timer;
static void test_button(void* arg);
const esp_timer_create_args_t debounce_timer_args = {
.callback = &test_button,
/* argument specified here will be passed to timer callback function */
.arg = NULL,
.name = "test_button"
};
The timer function, is called by an interruption at the end of the timer. It verify if the button is still pushed, and then switch state (1-0=1, 1-0=1). The external LED is set at the opposite of the actual state, if board LED blinks, then external red LED is off (line 44).
static void test_button(void* arg) {
if (gpio_get_level(EXTERN_BUT) == 1)
{
state = 1 - state;
gpio_set_level(EXTERN_LED, 1 - state);
}
}
The isr_button_pressed
callback function is called when the button is pushed down. (at the positive edge, POSEDGE). Due to the bounce it can be called several times for one human analogue pressure. We still need to double check we are really at push down state (high voltage) at the end of a short delay, else goes out. We then verify that the timer wasn't started before. If it wasn't (!
) the case then we start once the timer that will start test_button()
function after 1 millisecond (1000 microseconds). This avoid bounce but still allow quick repeated push (for fast Morse code typing, of furious action games) (line 52):
static void isr_button_pressed(void* args) {
if (gpio_get_level(EXTERN_BUT) == 0)
return; // we only want to manage pushed button
if (!esp_timer_is_active(debounce_timer)) { // start only if the timer isn't active
ESP_ERROR_CHECK(esp_timer_start_once(debounce_timer, 1000)); // 1ms = 1Kµs
}
}
p.s.: I found an article about another method for debouncing specifically with RTOS capabilities too.