I Built the ESP32 Course I Wish I'd Had — 22 Episodes on Wearable Electronics & Fashion Tech
A complete beginner's course in ESP32, conductive fabric, NeoPixels, and wearable firmware — starting now on the CMozMaker YouTube channel.
If you've ever picked up an ESP32 development board, stared at the pinout diagram, and quietly put it back in the drawer — this post is for you.
If you've been sewing for years and you're curious about the electronics side but don't know where the door is — this post is for you too.
And if you're already making things but your code is a tangled 400-line main.cpp that you're slightly afraid of — especially for you.
The CMozMaker Foundations playlist is now live on YouTube. It's a 22-episode course that takes you from zero knowledge of microcontrollers to a complete, battery-powered, touch-reactive wearable built into real fabric. No prior electronics experience required. No prior coding experience required. Just curiosity and a willingness to build things.
What Is This Series?
ESP32 for Beginners: Wearable Electronics & Fashion Tech — Complete Course is the foundational curriculum I've wanted to make since I started CMozMaker. It covers everything I needed to know when I started — and everything I've learned since — organised into a logical progression that builds one skill on top of the last.
Twenty-two episodes. Five tiers. One complete wearable build at the end.
👉🏻New episodes drop approximately every ten days, so if you start now and follow along, you'll reach the capstone build by November. Or binge it. No judgement.
The Five Tiers
The series is structured in five tiers, each one building on the last.
Tier 1 — The Absolute Beginning (Episodes 1–6) What a microcontroller is. Why the ESP32. How to set up PlatformIO in VS Code — the professional toolchain that most tutorials skip in favour of the Arduino IDE. How to write a proper main.cpp. How to read a pinout diagram so you never connect the wrong pin again.
Tier 2 — Core Electronics (Episodes 7–10) Voltage, current, resistance, and Ohm's Law — explained for makers, not engineers. Breadboards and schematics. Digital versus analog GPIO. Power: LiPo batteries, charge management, and how to stop your wearable from browning out mid-performance.
Tier 3 — Communication & Connectivity (Episodes 11–14) Serial communication and the debugging skills that separate struggling beginners from confident makers. I2C — two wires, unlimited sensors. SPI — speed for displays and storage. WiFi — connecting your garment to the internet.
Tier 4 — Wearables & E-textiles (Episodes 15–18) This is where CMozMaker becomes itself. WS2812B NeoPixels from scratch — wiring, power maths, GRB colour order, FastLED, and four essential animations. Conductive fabric and thread — materials, resistance values, sewing technique, and connections. Capacitive touch sensing with zero extra components. LiPo power chains built specifically for on-body use, including safety rules nobody else talks about.
Tier 5 — Putting It Together (Episodes 19–22) Reading and debouncing buttons — and why delay() breaks wearables. Using libraries correctly — the PlatformIO registry, version pinning, and how to never let a background update break a finished project. Code structure — header files, source files, and the state machine pattern that replaces spaghetti loop() code. And the capstone: a complete wearable build using everything in the series.
The Capstone Build
Episode 22 is the build the whole series exists to support.
Eight WS2812B LEDs sewn into fabric. A conductive fabric touch pad that cycles through three animations when touched. A LiPo battery running through a TP4056 charge management module and an MT3608 boost converter to provide stable 5V. A voltage divider monitoring battery level and adjusting behaviour accordingly. And a four-state state machine — IDLE, ACTIVE, NEXT_MODE, and LOW_BATT — tying all of it together in clean, modular C++ built on the project structure from Episode 21.
No USB cable. No laptop. Just a garment, a battery the size of a credit card, and everything from the playlist running from it.
Why PlatformIO Instead of the Arduino IDE?
Episode 2 makes the case properly, but the short version is this: PlatformIO is a professional-grade development environment that lives inside VS Code. It has IntelliSense — meaning it catches errors as you type rather than at compile time. It pins library versions per project — meaning a background update to FastLED cannot silently break a project you finished six months ago. It supports multiple board targets from a single project file. And it builds on VS Code, which is the most widely used code editor in the world, so the skills transfer everywhere.
Most beginner ESP32 content teaches the Arduino IDE because it's familiar. This series teaches PlatformIO from Episode 2 because you deserve the better tool.
What Makes This Series Different
There are good ESP32 tutorials on YouTube. What there are not many of are ESP32 tutorials that treat wearable electronics and e-textiles as the primary use case rather than an afterthought.
The moment this series puts on a different hat is Tier 4. Conductive fabric has resistance. That resistance accumulates with length. A long sewn power trace drops voltage and causes LEDs at the far end of a garment to be dimmer than the ones near the source. Ohm's Law — which we covered in Episode 7 — applies to conductive thread exactly as it applies to copper wire. That connection between electronics fundamentals and garment construction is what this series is built to make.
The series also covers things that most tutorials skip: the JST polarity check before connecting any new LiPo battery, the MT3608 boost converter calibration step that most people miss, the on-body safety rules specific to wearing a LiPo against clothing, the debounce interval adjustment for conductive snaps versus machined metal buttons, and the git workflow that protects a finished project from its own library updates.
These aren't advanced topics. They're the practical knowledge that turns a build that works on the bench into one that works reliably at a show, on a body, all night.
Who This Series Is For
Complete beginners who want to learn electronics and embedded programming with a clear goal in mind rather than abstract exercises. Every concept in this series is introduced in the context of something you'll actually build.
Sewists and textile artists who are curious about the electronics side. The series assumes no electronics background and introduces every concept from first principles. Tier 4 is written specifically with you in mind.
Makers who have been at it for a while but feel like their code structure could be better, their power management could be more reliable, or their projects could be more repeatable. Tiers 2 and 5 especially.
Anyone who started with an Arduino Uno and knows they've hit its ceiling. Episode 1 explains exactly what the ceiling is and why the ESP32 is the natural next step.
The Schedule
New episodes drop approximately every ten days. The full series runs through to November 2026, finishing with the capstone build.
If you want to follow along in real time, subscribing to the CMozMaker YouTube channel is the best way to get notified when each episode goes live. You can also follow on Instagram and join the community that's building alongside the series.
If you'd rather wait and binge the full thing, the complete playlist will be there whenever you're ready. The series is designed to be self-contained and evergreen — Episode 1 will be as useful in two years as it is today.
All the Components
Every component used in this series — conductive fabrics, conductive thread, WS2812B LEDs, (not currently shipping) LiPo batteries, TP4056 and MT3608 modules, JST cables, ESP32 boards, and more — is available at Tinkertailor.ca.
Tinkertailor is my small Canadian shop specialising in wearable electronics components and conductive textiles. If you're in Canada, it's the fastest and most straightforward way to get exactly what the series uses. International shipping is available.
The shop also carries the conductive fabrics and threads featured in Episodes 16 and 17 — the materials that turn a circuit diagram into something you can actually wear.
Start Here
Episode 1 is live now.
It's called What Is a Microcontroller? (And Why the ESP32?) and it answers exactly that question — including the single most important fact about ESP32 logic voltage that will save your components every time you wire something new.
→ Watch Episode 1 on YouTube → View the full playlist: ESP32 for Beginners: Wearable Electronics & Fashion Tech — Complete Course → Shop the components at Tinkertailor.ca
See you in the comments.
— Christine
CMozMaker is a Halifax-based YouTube channel about wearable electronics, fashion tech, and making things that glow. New episodes every ten days.