site banner
ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   529 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for September 2, 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

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Okay long summer outdoors stuff is winding down. Back to Tron bike lighting!

Seems like I fried my ESP32-C3 by over-tightening the adjustment screw on the 12v step-down converter. Apparently if you break the screw it just kind of wobbles and the "5v" you're reading right now might change in an instant.

Then I broke a second buck converter doing this same oven-tightening before realizing the ESP32 was already fried anyway.

Electricity is kind of unforgiving :/

I did one of these successfully for the proof of concept but I guess forgot or got sloppy in the intervening months. On the bright side, everything involved is only $2-4 each!

The adjustment screws on those controllers are almost always simple multi-turn potentiometers, so it's a little weird to see voltage wobble even if one breaks off entirely. Lower-end buck converters can sometimes act up if you try to calibrate them without a load. Putting a 2.5-5k ohm resistor (for 12v, this should keep under 1/8th watt) on the output side may be worth a shot.

I got interested in the ESP32 stuff just from learning a little about the language, Espressif? It might have been something else, and you can see I never got into it. But one day! I will be a hardware guy doing a lot with cheap chips.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats