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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

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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!

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.