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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2d ago (text post)   269 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 29, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Parts arrived for my TRON helmet/vest/bike lighting project. I spent the weekend reading about ESP32 programming, buck converters, logic level shifters, etc.

I spent a long time trying to diagnose problems with the logic level shifter before just skipping it. Then the LEDs on the lighting strip lit up fine with the ESP32 driving it; got a basic POC working. Next it's time to pick a battery pack and also find a project box I can cram everything into. I guess also figure out if I want to use clear heat shrink tubing to protect the LED strips or get silicone diffuser tubing.

Also I'm getting a bit annoyed that everything I need comes in a 6-12 pack that costs $10 on Amazon. Prime shipping has it's down sides I guess.

Also there's, like, a lot of annoying one millimeter misalignments to deal with? My ESP32 doesn't fit into my breadboard, and neither does the buck converter. Only the logic level shifter does. Cool. Guessing it'll be some different annoying combination of issues with a protoboard?

It would be really nice to walk into a store or sit at a small electronics work bench just to see what all of the options are rather than blindly guessing at what I might need off of a web site.

This is what I mostly don't enjoy about small electronics hacking, feels mostly like you need to be very familiar with catalogs to avoid wasting a ton of time or making a lot of compromises.

What fashion or stylistic choices are you making to avoid a fate of becoming the next Tron Guy[1]?

[1] https://tron.fandom.com/wiki/Jay_Maynard

wdym?? that guy is peak sigma male

more seriously I'm thinking something closer to Cyberpunk 2077 motif, I'm saying TRON because it's more widely recognized and still involves the same tech tree from a lighting perspective

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