Keyestudio Smart Home

A few months ago I bought a Keyestudio Smart Home, assembled it and tried to program it using the Arduino IDE. However I kept getting the following error when trying to upload a sketch to the board.

 avrdude: stk500_getsync() attempt 1 of 10: not in sync: resp=0x2e
 avrdude: stk500_getsync() attempt 2 of 10: not in sync: resp=0x2e
 avrdude: stk500_getsync() attempt 3 of 10: not in sync: resp=0x2e

Initially I thought it was an issue with the QinHeng Electronics CH340 serial converter driver software. After exchanging a few emails with keyestudio support however I was pointed out that the board type of my smart home version was not “Arduino Uno”. The box of the control board says “Keyestudio Control Board for ESP-32” and I had to install version 3.1.3 of the esp32 board software for being able to program the board. I.e. the Keyestudio IoT Smart Home Kit for ESP32 is not to be confused with the Keyestudio Smart Home Kit for Arduino.

The documentation for the Keyestudio smart home using ESP-32 is here. Also the correct version of the smart home sketches are here. Finally you can find many sample projects in the keyestudio blog. Note that in some cases you have to adapt the io pin numbers using the smart home documentation.

Many thanks to Keyestudio support for helping me to get it working.