Is there a trick to getting an ESP32 to sit on a breadboard without blocking everything?

The power rails are seperate pieces on most breadboards, so yes, they pop off. They're held on by that double-sided foam tape, no clips or anything. You just work a fingernail or a thin butter knife under the edge of the rail and peel it away. The catch is the foam backing usally rips or leaves sticky residue behind, especally on the cheap ones. I did this with a couple of dollar-store boards and the foam came up in shreds. Didn't matter much because I stuck them down to a scrap of MDF afterward, but if you care about the look, it won't come off clean.

Once a rail is off, you can butt two boards together so the center columns double up, and an ESP32 dev board sits with a few rows free on each side. If the sticky mess bugs you, a diffrent route is to just cut one board down the middle with a fine saw. That's what I ended up doing with one of mine since peeling wasn't working, and the cut edge is ragged but perfectly usable.

That said, I mostly stopped fighting this at all. I soldered a row of right-angle header pins to my ESP32 so it points sideways, then wired it to the breadboard with short jumper leads. The board sits off to the side and the breadboard rows stay free for the actual circuit. It looks messier but it's way more flexible, and the ESP never blocks anything.

Your NodeMCU is the same deal. Those wide pin rows eat the middle no matter what. If you've got a spare micro breadboard or even just some female-female jumpers, running it off-board is honestly the least annoying solution. The two-boards-together trick is nice when you want everything plugged in solid, but for prototyping I like the module hanging loose.

Interesting to read this because my situation is kind of flipped. I bought one of the bigger 830 point breadboards early on and the gap is wide enough that my ESP32 only eats a couple rows on each side, so I never dealt with the prying thing. Not sure if that counts as advice or just luck. My only issue is it's now too big to sit next to my laptop without hogging the desk. Does anyone else find the bigger boards get wobbly on the rubber feet when you jam jumpers in and out? Mine slides around when I yank a wire out.

Gotta push back on the saw idea. I tried that exact thing with an old board and the plastic dust settles right into the contact clips, so half the holes near the cut stopped gripping wires properly. Plus the foam backing never lines up again so the two halves slide around on the desk. Way easier to just buy boards with a wider gap in the first place, or pick ESP32 clones that are narrow enough to straddle the center channel with a row free on each side. They exist and they cost about the same as the wide ones.

Update: I skipped the peeling after reading that the foam usually rips anyway, and just picked up one of the wider boards like the second poster uses. Fits the ESP32 fine now. New thing I noticed though: there's a strip of dead holes between the chip legs and the power rails, so my jumpers are getting long and messy. Do people just live with that, or is there a tidy way to bridge it?