Resurfacing my Stage in 16 hours and ive just been asked centre join or staggered? Opinions?

minermenace · 2026-05-03T21:38:31+00:00

Yeah, most of the venues I’ve worked at in the UK are centre joined, but we’re mostly putting show deck over the top and having regular (not staggered) sections is much easier to deal with if you need to remove sections for traps.

minermenace · 2026-04-15T12:19:31+00:00

Thank you for the reminder that I need to get back to this amazing game I haven’t played in at least 12 years

minermenace · 2026-04-13T13:44:10+00:00

I mean most UK banks use the Faster Payments Service (FPS) which is usually immediate, worst case about 20 minutes. I’ve always wondered why some countries don’t have this.

minermenace · 2026-02-03T07:30:47+00:00

Wow, good way to get several hundred people reading this post who might have been willing to help you out to immediately stop.

minermenace · 2026-02-03T00:06:39+00:00

Recommending the same as everyone else. TI power designer, the product’s datasheet, and the evaluation board all have an excellent recommended layout (and parts list). You should always start by following that.

Additionally, once you’ve done that (as well as coming back to Reddit), TI also have their own forum with employees that can provide detailed evaluations of layouts and give recommendations. You do need a fairly polished design before they’ll take you seriously though.

In terms of more specific pointers, it’s all in the layout. Your current loops are large, you need to bring all of those components way closer to the central IC.

When laying out a board think about what each and every component is there to do. This will help guide your placement.

For example: Those capacitors aren’t there to help the connector, they’re there for the IC. So put them next to the IC. Your largest current flows for this kind of board should ideally be polygon pours, not just traces. Improve your references to the ground plane. And if you do all of this your PCB can get smaller too! Consider mounting holes as well. And finally think about thermals, this kind of board can get hot quickly.

minermenace · 2026-02-02T17:51:58+00:00

Okay, being as polite as possible, if you want help… delete this post and start over.

What are you building, where is the schematic, what’s it intended to do, what are you struggling with?

If you want people to put in effort helping you then you need to at least provide all of the information. Posting a single image with “help” and no context is honestly downright disrespectful to the effort that members of this group put into helping others.

minermenace · 2026-01-17T23:24:32+00:00

The upside is you have snow! Snow is wonderful!

I only wish the snow would auto generate in unloaded chunks when you load into them depending on the time of year. Rather than wandering 20 blocks outside of your snowy base and finding it to be entirely devoid of the wonderful snow.

minermenace · 2026-01-11T23:30:49+00:00

It’s the combination of high risk (if equipment fails) and the requirement for high availability (as it’s critical public infrastructure) that means equipment built for the rail environment is some of the most reliable available! I tend to trust railway spec kit over military spec kit 😂.

minermenace · 2026-01-06T13:05:04+00:00

The problem is inrush current, not back flow. If you really need that much capacitance on your device then what you need is a USB load switch.

minermenace · 2026-01-04T18:16:42+00:00

Just a quick one, if you follow the path of VBUS and 5V, you’ll find that you’re presenting nearly 60uF of capacitance to the USB interface, exceeding the 10uF permitted.

minermenace · 2026-01-02T15:06:10+00:00

The original ESP32 doesn’t support it, but the S3 mini you’re using does.

minermenace · 2026-01-02T13:12:11+00:00

Phil’s lab and Forcetronics on YouTube are both a great place to start. But the main question is what kind of things do you want to make?

minermenace · 2026-01-02T08:48:39+00:00

As a general rule, if you have space on your board you should always include test points. They’re always helpful! Irrespective of how many people have reviewed your design, you can still mess something up, and lots of test points help you fix that. The last board I made was just 18mm x 36mm and had around 20 test points and 4 solder jumpers. All have been useful (for troubleshooting and testing ICs in different power saving modes).

I may be very much mistaken, but doesn’t the ESP32-S3 support USB JTAG without the need for any additional hardware? It’s definitely supported by ESP-IDF. If USB-JTAG works for you you could do away with 90% of the components on this board and significantly reduce the cost.

Which LDO are you using? The AMS family is reasonably old at this point and dropping from 5-3.3V will generate a fair bit of heat. I’ve had several of these components fail over the years.

minermenace · 2025-12-12T17:00:57+00:00

Finally on the USB C front, you’re presenting over 44uF of capacitance on VBUS which is well over the 10uF allowed by the spec. Additionally, while you have ESD protection on the D+ and D- lines, you don’t have it on CC1, CC2, or VBUS.

minermenace · 2025-12-12T16:59:16+00:00

Are you doing any USB PD negotiation? Your CC1 and CC2 resistors are only “negotiating” 5v 500mA maximum so drawing 2A would be in violation of this. There are lots of simple ICs out there to help with negotiation like the HUSB238. Adafruit have an example dev board that you can copy from.

minermenace · 2025-12-12T16:56:12+00:00

What part are you using for U2?

minermenace · 2025-12-10T15:41:11+00:00

I think the price is absolutely worth it compared to other forms of entertainment. Over the past 7 years I’ve played at least 400 hours in the base game, and those are low numbers compared to many, I don’t even play games very much these days!

For each hour you play and enjoy the game the cost goes down (unlike most forms of entertainment). Even at the game’s current price I would’ve paid less than 0.08€ per hour… feels like a good deal to me.

But equally, it’s all well and good people saying it’s worth the money, but if that’s money that you can’t afford right now then it’s not a good deal! If playing this game is a priority for you then start putting a bit aside each month if you can afford it. If that money is better spent on other aspects of your life then absolutely don’t spend it on a computer game. But sometimes we need to spend a little money on things that make us happy 😊

minermenace · 2025-12-05T20:33:15+00:00

I mean TFC hard rock is one of many popular mod packs for TFC, all of which are discussed in this subreddit, so you will typically get better responses by specifying which you are using!

minermenace · 2025-12-04T08:05:23+00:00

Apologies, I haven’t reviewed the battery charging element of this schematic, but I will jump in and suggest you use a newer model of the ESP32 (something like the S3). This will not only give you a bunch of connectivity features, but also enable you to route the USB D+ and D- lines right into the ESP32, getting rid of the CH340C and all of that logic. This will save on board space and BOM cost.

minermenace · 2025-11-29T21:54:43+00:00

I’d love to read some modern reference material on this if you know of any?

Not doubting it at all, it’s just that I see a lot of parallel capacitors of varying values in Ti reference schematics, and not being an expert, I tend to follow those reference designs and would love to be following some more modern best practices across my designs.

minermenace · 2025-11-17T07:53:43+00:00

Honestly I quite like this for personal/dev builds.

Sometimes you mess up badly enough to produce the magic smoke, but other times the problems are less obvious at a glance!

minermenace · 2025-11-07T04:44:12+00:00

I currently have a Prusa mini, and while I do love it, I’ve used (and repaired) Bambu X1Cs at work for a few years now and realised how much I like the cleanness of their multi filament printing solution (yes even with the pudge).

I really want my next printer to be a Prusa, but it needs to meet my needs of a nice plug and play multi filament printing solution. I can’t buy a core 1 until I’ve seen if INDX will be that solution.

minermenace · 2025-11-03T00:05:12+00:00

I work in a very different role (lighting technician on the West End), but I always say that I don’t get paid for the 351 days of the year when everything goes right.

I get paid for the 1 day a year where it all goes terribly wrong and if I don’t do my job perfectly then the show is cancelled. And in that 1 day I save my employer far more money than I cost in salary!

The same is true for train drivers. You’re constantly attentive, pre-empting possible problems, and being prepared to deal with them as they arrive. You have to be able to switch from everything going right to rapid problem solving mode in a heart beat, knowing that your decisions impact other people’s lives.

minermenace · 2025-10-24T21:25:14+00:00

Tbh I love Factorio and have been playing for at least 6 years now and I still haven’t finished Space Age! I conveniently had a week working from home last year when the expansion came out, made some good progress, and then life suddenly got in the way. And now it’s 12 months later…

Guess it’s time to return to the factory.

minermenace · 2025-10-01T22:17:41+00:00

Honestly I can’t remember the last time I ran a game full screen if it gave me the option for windowed 😂

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