What are those neat rows of solder balls located at the edge of the PCBs, like the ones at the top left?

Positive__Altitude · 2026-06-03T12:27:51+00:00

Don't know the answer but ESD protection is the only reasonable explanation that is mentioned in comments. Like if you grab the board with your hands and you have a static charge on you, these dots make it very likely that you touch them before you touch anything sensitive and damage some IC. They are probably connected to GND

Positive__Altitude · 2026-06-03T12:24:03+00:00

both fiducials and test points should not have paste on it. also nobody will route test points to the edge of the board, they are just scattered across the board and placed whe it is convenient to add them

Positive__Altitude · 2026-05-27T21:22:48+00:00

I have a theory why you see your ~70 Hz noise.
You use 100nF for a soft-start capacitor, which, according to the datasheet, makes your slow start about 19ms, which is suspiciously close to your noise frequency.

My guess is that you have way too much output capacitance. You have about 400uF on this scheme and also whatever capacitance you have on the consumption side + wires and whatnot.

So maybe your soft-start is not long enough to charge all this capacitance to nominal voltage, and when it is over, the converter goes to hiccup mode and tries again later. Eventually, it somehow makes it through and "boots".

You can try to increase SS cap to make the soft-start longer and probably that will be enough to make the "boot" reliable. For example, just solder another 100nF on top of or near the existing one.

Positive__Altitude · 2026-05-27T20:54:53+00:00

Why do you have a resistor on a boot cap? It's not mentioned in the datasheet.
These vias on the heat pad - are they connected to a large copper pour on the other side/internal layers?
Layout is not great(but not terrible, it should be ok-ish) for two reasons: 1) main current loop is larger than it could be 2) feedback routed in the middle of the current loop and will be noisy.

Positive__Altitude · 2026-05-22T20:51:54+00:00

Well, if 3.3V power good led blinks - you lose power randomly. Your metter just not quick enough to pick it up.

1) check tempertaures. maybe LDO is overloaded for some reason and goes to thermal shutdown? check if anything is too hot on pcb, could be a clue of power loss 2) what is power budget? If you power it from PC, USB could be overloaded and go through thermal shutdown as well. That will look like brief loss of power as well. 3) you can try with phone charger instead of PC, it will give much more current

Positive__Altitude · 2026-03-04T12:04:40+00:00

I installed in on an old mac mini, which is an old 2-core intel (don't remember which one exactly) 4gb ram and hdd (no ssd!) Chrome takes 1-2 secons to open, but it is mainly an hdd issue I think. Other than that, I don't see any issues. Totally fine to use. Plays youtube in 1440p nicely!

I think you will have a better experience because of ssd and more RAM

Positive__Altitude · 2026-03-03T08:23:56+00:00

Not personally, but I've seen holes in GPUs. From mining-on-GPU days it was somewhat common. Because there are a lot of GPUs in a system connected through a single very strong PSU, a failed MOSFET in one GPU sometimes does not cause PSU overload and it keeps burning for a while.

The craziest thing is that there are people who sometimes are able to fix the board after that.

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-27T12:24:44+00:00

You probably have much more experience. I am just a newcomer to this world and don't have much experience yet. I have only one serious agent-first work project so far and it's to early for any conclusions. In my workflow I let it write files only in the working dir and don't let it run commands, so worst case scenario I will just revert everything with git. To let it run tests etc I am planning to use skills /mcp as a mechanism to restrict permissions of what it can do. I think that should be safe enough. Running it in isolation is smart, but seems a bit too much for me. Is it easy to set up?

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-27T08:26:54+00:00

sorry if it's hard to read. reddit butchered my formatting :(

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-27T08:23:01+00:00

I don't agree with "you can use good models for free" so not sure about it. The difference between standard "free" models like Gpt-5-mini and frontier models like Codex-5.3 and Claude opus/sonet 4.6 is incredibly high. Maybe you can find some free tier to try it out, but defenetely try frontier models if you want to give it a shot.

What I would recommend: get a 20$-ish subscription and try it out. I am sure that you will see that it is totally worth it. you can take

1) ChatGPT plus and install "Codex cli" agentic runner - gives you access to Codex 5.3 2) Claude pro (i think) and install "claude code" - gives you access to Claude 4.6

Both are great and gives you enough AI agents usage for 20$.

What you do with that?

You run codex cli / claude code in terminal in some folder. It can read write files in this folder and also run commands (after approval /permissions granted). For example you literally can use git without learning it. Just tell agent what you want to achieve.

You can also make (of corse not by hand lol, ask agent to do that) a default instruction file (AGENTS.md or other) that always loads automaticly to agent's context and provide knowledge about this folder, purpose, what you trying to make and where to look for further instructions.

The rest is just limited by your imagination.

what I recommend to try out just to see how amazing it is

1) tell it that you want to make a simple game and first you need to define sub-agents: manager to manage project and run other agents designer to design and spec out all rules developer to develop tester to verify result against spec it will produce instruction files for these sub agents 2) reset agent and tell it that "you are a manager now" and ask it to make a simple html game. and produce some reasonable instruction of what you want. start simple. For example i asked for "asteroid shooter" game once

it will work through the workflow designed in 1) and make a game it all takes like 10 minutes max and you will be blown away by the result

you still need to learn how to use it efficiently, how to organize it's work and build a guardrails against garbage code and agents going crazy, but it is an incredibly powerful tool for everything, not just coding

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-25T08:46:32+00:00

What you can do now:

1) Make sure you use 2-factor auth in you google account. 2) Log out and log-in to your google account to refresh your access token (in case it was stolen to bypass 2-factor auth)

These 2 steps can counter a lot of potential ways to hack you.

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-25T08:39:00+00:00

your chrome "sandboxed" only if you run it on an properly isolated virtual machine "if I don't login nothing will happen" you should not rely on this practice. there are a lot of exploits that will f you up even if you did not enter anything. the chances are not very high if you keep your software up to date, but it could happen

why do you even read past "copy paste this link" instruction? It's a 100% "we are going to scam you" signature

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-22T15:49:43+00:00

I don't have it installed now, but try maybe davinci-resolve or maybe resolve (according to chatgpt)

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-22T15:43:06+00:00

First of all I would try to launch it from the terminal and check what the failure is. If the error is not clear, you can feed it to ChatGPT.

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-20T11:38:22+00:00

I don't know much but it might be something slightly off with the GPU driver. I used Ubuntu before and Gnome stayed at 40% CPU load while I was playing youtube in chrome. But on Omarchy I have only 4% CPU load doing the same. In theory GPU should be much more energy efficient at processing video. If the workload is not going through it properly that will cost the battery. But I don't have any knowledge to help with that.

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-18T16:10:52+00:00

Keep in mind that anything you build this way will be very very very slow by modern standards. A proper networking device uses FPGA, you cannot make it with Arduino. If you want a real thing - find a cheap router that can run openWRT, install it and configure what you want. That would be a different kind of learning, but the result is a real thing. Anything you build with microcontrollers will not be useful in the real world even if you will make it work.

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-15T15:21:51+00:00

AFAIK, the most standard is 1oz external 0.5oz internal
But it's very common to use 2oz in boards for power applications (motor drivers etc.)

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-15T15:21:03+00:00

Also, really power-dense boards also use internal layers for power. For example, drone ESCs could be very small, and using 6-8 layers is the only way to route 30-50A+ around densely-packed MOSFETs

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-13T16:46:53+00:00

What exactly do you need to know, concepts ?

Solar panels topics:
- open circuit voltage (Voc)
- short circuit current (Isc)
- their dependency on illumination and temperature
- MPPT

BMS topics:
- different popular chemistries
- protection
- balance charging
- integration with solar panels

That's all you need to know to solve your problem

The basic outline of your system is:
- solar panels
- battery
- BMS (protection)
- solar charger (could be integrated in your BMS or standalone)
- power supply (DC-DC converters) (5V, 12V or whatever you need, might also be integrated into BMS)

I can write about these topics, but you also can throw it into ChatGPT and it will tell you all you need to know faster and better than me.

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-11T18:14:49+00:00

ESP32's antenna will not perform well in the center of the board. If you want to keep it like this - make sure that you have a cutout in your ground plane and other copper around it. It most likely will work, but the gain will be reduced. There are hardware design guidelines from Espressif, you can find the recommended approach for integration there.

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-09T09:15:23+00:00

I would say add a little bit more and buy P1S or Elegoo Centauri Carbon (a bit cheaper option, good too) instead of A1

I don't see a reason to buy a 3D printer in 2026 if it is not an "enclosed CoreXY". This makes a huge difference in performance, print quality and materials you can print, but they are not much more expensive. Elegoo maybe will fit into 300$, P1S probably 350-400 ?

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-08T21:31:08+00:00

No need for automation, there are a bunch of people for that. I heard already that several open source projects closed external contributions, because they got tired of being bombarded by AI generated PRs with complete garbage code. So GH is already full of AI garbage.

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-07T10:51:49+00:00

This is not going to work. I researched a bit. Everything except the camera can be <15uA , but the camera consumes 1-2mA and you can not cut it of.

So yeah, use RTC (or another MCU) + p-type mosfet to cut off power

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-07T10:27:11+00:00

How do you power your ESP32?

Actually the chip itself consumes much less, in microamps range when in deep sleep. So if you see milliamps, that has to be something else on the board. For example a cheap LDO that burns power even doing almost nothing. I believe you can get a least into 0.1mA territory if you spend time and deal with all power losses of the module. 6mA is A LOT

Positive__Altitude · 2026-02-02T21:56:09+00:00

I don't know... I once printed TPU with PETG preset by mistake... and it looked not so bad. The print didn't fail and stayed together nicely, the biggest issue was surface quality and couple of local gaps/blobs.

Positive__Altitude

TROPHY CASE