I'm currently working on a project based attempting to combine the Deej volume mixer, an OLED display, and an audio source hotkey changer via bluetooth connection. This is my unfinished progress so far, I have little to no knowledge of c++ so my apologies if anything is poorly done.
Unfortunately, I already purchased an arduino nano and hc-05 bluetooth adapter without realizing the nano doesn't allow for Keyboard.h inputs (to my knowledge).
Would it be worthwhile / possible to purchase an ESP32 (or other similar model) and convert my project accordingly? Of course the audio source swapping isn't a necessity, however this is my first arduino project and I haven't purchased a case just yet, so I'm hoping to be thorough once I finally assemble anything.
However, the Nano is a very nice board so I think you will be happy to have it on hand to use for other projects that don't require keyboard emulation capability.
It is certainly possible.
Note that there are multiple microcontrollers in the ESP32 family and not all of them have the USB HID capability that is needed to emulate a keyboard. From the title of the topic, it seems you are considering using a board with the ESP32-S3 microcontroller, and that microcontroller does indeed have USB HID capability. So make sure the board you select has that microcontroller and not the ESP32 microcontroller, which does not have USB HID capability.
As for "worthwhile", since it seems that keyboard emulation is not a hard requirement, I think that is for you to decide. It is common to encounter problems when porting a project from one microcontroller architecture to another, as you would be doing. For example, you might find that library or code you are using is not compatible with the new architecture. Or you might encounter difficulties with your hardware caused by the change from the 5 V logic level of the Nano to the 3.3 V level of the ESP32-S3.
You could do a basic "smoke test" check of software compatibility by simply compiling your sketch for the ESP32-S3 board. If the sketch that worked for the Nano fails to compile for the ESP32-S3 board, you will know there is some problem, and might be able to get an idea of the severity by evaluating the error messages. If compilation passes, this is not necessarily a guarantee that the program will actually work as expected on the ESP32-S3, so this is not a perfect validation, but you don't need to have any hardware on hand to perform it so it is at least a cheap one.
I see, thanks for letting me know. I'll definitely try a smoke test because on the surface it seems simple and would be nice to have bluetooth already connected, however I already bought the nano and hc-05 so I'm not sure what I'd do with them otherwise. If you have any other simple potentiometer nano project suggestions I'd love to know. I'll have to think about it, but voltage wise I think everything should be ok.
Thanks for letting me know, unfortunately at that price however I'm better off buying an ESP32. At this point the only draw back right now is trying to convert the code, which almost works other than the OLED not connecting
There is a tremendous amount of projects you could do involving a Nano board and a potentiometer so it's hard to know where to even start with suggesting. It really depends on your area of interest. For example, I think that playing with RGB LEDs is really cool, so I might make a project where I control a strip of addressable LEDs in interesting patterns with the Nano and use the potentiometer to adjust the pattern.
Since you are into audio, you might be interested in some of the amazing Arduino-based projects by the artist "LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER". They use the Nano in most of those projects. The big projects are not something for a beginner to take on, but they also also make some fairly approachable projects like synthesizer modules.