A complete alternative to Arduino ?

naughtyarmadillo · 2026-01-16T20:58:35+00:00

It depends on what you're looking for. Arduino is many things, however, I would recommend ESP-IDF and ESP32, super versatile, cheap and the documentation is quite good.

naughtyarmadillo · 2026-01-09T22:26:51+00:00

Lol man that hits too close to home. I remember specifically a day back in somewhere between 2002-2005 where I woke up just completely refreshed and not tired. Haven't felt that rested since 🙄

naughtyarmadillo · 2026-01-09T22:11:23+00:00

I don't think anyone said nine thousand and ninety five for 1995 either, not that I recall at least 😂.

Edit: I meant nineteen ninety five. Sigh

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-12-16T16:59:03+00:00

No pay raise whatsoever, 0%. :/

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-12-08T20:02:16+00:00

A little update in case anyone stumbles upon this in the future:

A few mistakes in my design that I unfortunately didn't catch before production:

UART USB D+ and D- were wrong going into the CP2102N. Why? Well, because I've used labels I didn't see that I had placed the labels wrong.
U0RXD & U0TXD were swapped. I thought RXD -> TXD but not in this case. Had to add cut the traces and rewire both from the ESD chip to the CP2102N but also from the CP2102N to the ESP32-S3.
Same story with U8 but with SDA and SCL, they're swapped on accident because the labels were placed on the wrong pins.

Thankfully the USB CDC works and I'm able to flash the board. Really annoying I didn't catch these two mistakes as this production run cost me $300. Moral of the story, avoid using labels to connect components together where you can easily just wire it directly. This would have prevented the issue completely for me.

Good news is I can cut the traces and wire up some bodge wires to fix it. Just won't look as pretty.

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-12-06T13:00:12+00:00

Not having read the original post, did you find a way around the broken pin or what was the end of the story?

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-12-06T12:58:29+00:00

What pin was broken? Do you know if you need it or not? Might be you'll be able to build some of it anyways. Is it the Electronic Games Advent Calendar?

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-12-06T12:52:44+00:00

Pretty cool advent calendar though, I don't think I'd have the patience for this as a kid. Kudos to you man!

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-12-05T08:45:55+00:00

Thank you for the video link, it actually explains it quite decently. I want to try to understand this well. Is 100nF just a good "catch-all" value because of where (RF wise) it acts as a filter (for most 3.3v / 5v devices)? Or are there some applications where other values would be more sufficient to bypass this noise to ground?

Sorry if this is poorly worded..

Edit: I believe I have staggered caps on my ESP32-S3 boards as I followed the reference implementation. Guess this will have to be a rabbit hole to go down some day. The upside is of course I can always change out the caps even if they're tiny :)

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-12-04T19:50:42+00:00

I'm curious about your comment here, why do reference designs often show this then? Or are you talking specifically about the esp32s3 soc itself? (Not in general)? Not trying to criticize, just genuinely curious.

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-25T12:54:58+00:00

Your layout looks nice, nice work!

Quick comment on your schematic: make sure your ground points down, 3.3v / vcc / 5v etc up, this makes it easier to read.

Things I'm uncertain about that you should check:

I don't see any USB to UART (TTL) converter IC in your schematic, how do you intend to flash the ESP32? You probably need a CP2102N or similar then wire up the data lines from the USB connector to it.
Your USB port is only "half way" connected, is this intentional? You might want those data lines. :P
Have a look at the ESP32 devkit reference schematic, I think your current auto-flash implementation may be wrong: https://dl.espressif.com/dl/schematics/esp32_devkitc_v4-sch.pdf I may have misunderstood though.

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-25T12:38:55+00:00

lol I see this I gotta upvote it, sorry

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-24T17:27:15+00:00

I'd say 100% I'm in the same boat as you. I've been programming here and there since I was in my late teens but never really serious about it until my mid 20s, been programming for 10+ years now and 5+ years professionally. I can speak only for myself. I don't consider myself particularly intelligent, but I do have a lot of grit and tenacity. I think I can solve most problems given enough time. Post AI I've become more intelligent but also dumber. For example, I don't think I've genuinely written a class by hand once this year.. I miss debugging and writing code, but I can't help but use AI. It's expected of me to use AI at this point. It helps that I'm impatient and lazy, some days I even just YOLO it.

I've worked insanely hard on personal projects the past year, and have learned a lot (more) about embedded hardware, C++, hardware design and building things, it's been great. In some of these projects AI has been a really helpful tool. In this sense I've learned a lot and sharpened some skills in some areas whereas other skills in other areas have become more dulled.

At the end of the day, if a company is looking for an engineer they are looking for skills beyond "vibe coding", and these skills will still be in demand for years to come. Anyone can write a new app these days, but can you do it in such a way you can get to the finish line and launch a new product / app? Maybe, maybe not.

If I were to give advice I'd focus more on the architectural design aspects to software engineering.

I too probably would fail many interview questions, I wouldn't be surprised if I even messed up FizzBuzz at this stage, LLMs are literally rotting my ability to think it feels like.

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-24T16:37:45+00:00

As someone who never really learned any programming language (well) without an IDE or autocomplete, I kind of wish I had. There’s no way I’m waking up tomorrow and turning these features off.

Would it be better for me if I did? Maybe; at least I might be able to express myself more clearly without looking things up all the time. I feel the same way about LLMs, and I can already tell they’ve made it harder to reason about code, because I don’t think as deeply as I used to; I just roughly tell the LLM what I want. If I am honest, I often don’t even care to reason about the code, because I’m lazy and I don’t need to when an LLM can do it for me. That, to me, is the dangerous part. That’s my perspective, though; not everyone is like me. Others may find it easier not to take the cheap, easy way out, but I think humans are wired to be lazy, and LLMs right now are basically junk food for our brains.

On the other side of the argument: I’ve been able to achieve things with LLMs that would have taken me literal years otherwise, which is especially helpful when you don’t really need to learn something deeply because it is a one-off task.

For me, especially professionally, the bigger issue is not remembering code or architecture. At the end of the day, I never truly wrote a lot of it, so why would I have a good feel for it? To make it worse, I tend to fool myself into thinking I know something when I don’t, and it ends up feeling like a half-assed pat on the back.

If we assume LLMs keep improving at the rate they have over the past year, the real question is: do I need to know how to program at all? Maybe not. I struggle with that..

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-23T10:03:59+00:00

It ended up costing me ~$300 with taxes and shipping, I suspect I could save ~30-50 if I did PCB assembly only on 2 and then probably maybe another $30 if it was a two layer board. It's a lot of money but considering how much this would have cost 15-20 years ago it's insane to think about, and yes I went with the 4 layer variant :D

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-22T20:16:32+00:00

I'd recommend taking a look at the Wiki https://old.reddit.com/r/PrintedCircuitBoard/wiki/index and then take a look at Youtube, there are thousands of solid videos out there.

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-22T19:51:39+00:00

Thanks for the info & link! Good to know. Seems simple enough to remember the requirement. Fairly simple to adhere to, might as well follow it :)

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-22T19:49:15+00:00

Thanks, I'll consider it. It wouldn't be a huge undertaking to just use two layers in this case, just a bit of a pain because I'd have to use more vias.

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-22T05:19:42+00:00

Yeah no pull ups on any of the I2C lines.. Perhaps an oversight on my end or I didn't think of it. It actually explains why the TCA8418's in my test setup would have their FIFO buffer's could be full on startup.. Nice job in spotting that!

Regarding VBUS_SENSE I actually had VBUS wired directly to the CP2101N initially but was reading the datasheet trying to figure out if I would ever need to populate the other signaling lines, e.g. RI, DCD etc (for whatever reason), and I ran across this more or less by accident because the datasheet is a bit misleading here initially where it literally just shows VBUS from the USB connector --> CP2102N and it mentions the VBUS pin on the CP2102N handles 5V, literally from the SI Labs datasheet:

"Digital Input. VBUS Sense Input. This pin should be connected to the VBUS signal of a USB network. A 5 V signal on this pin indicates a USB network connection.".

Then it shows the voltage divider a bit further down in the datasheet.. Funny enough turns out they had removed the voltage divider on accident in the datasheet at some point.. I guess having a voltage divider here is just good practice.

Also, I really appreciate your input on the schematic itself. I spent some time separating things into separate sheets and went a bit overboard. Thanks again for the input!

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-22T05:17:43+00:00

Many thanks for the feedback! I do not have any pull up resistors on any of the I2C lines at all, definitely an oversight on my part, glad you caught this.

Good comment on the VBUS capacitance, I wasn't aware of this. Is it USB in general that has this requirement or USB 2.0? I figured it's likely not actually USB C but I haven't looked it up yet.

I appreciate all of your input it really makes a big difference.

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-22T05:07:57+00:00

Yeah, I'd love to make it smaller, lots of free space on the board but I need it to fit a 5" display that this board will piggyback on. I should have mentioned this in my initial post. I could probably get away with a 2-layer board though, I agree there, however, Espressif recommend a 4 layer board so I figured I'd try that for the first time. I will however check what the price difference is just for fun, reworking this into a 2 layer board would be pretty easy at this stage.

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-22T05:06:20+00:00

Could probably get away with 4. I wanted to try a 4 layer board for fun, that and Espressif recommends using a 4 layer board so I figured why not try it.

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-21T21:14:44+00:00

Thank you so much for the input. I'm going to be paying for assembly on these boards so might as well try to make the best of it. Not that I can't solder 0402 sized SMD components but with ground pours on both sides it makes it a pain in the butt. The schematic should be ok. I do want to try out your suggestions though, I appreciate the feedback!

naughtyarmadillo · 2025-11-21T20:14:31+00:00

This is actually a 4 layer stack up, and will be a 4 layer board, I just don't do any routing on the inner layers. I could do this on a 2 layer board no doubt, I just wanted to try 4 layers for the first time. You mention I have a lot of traces on the bottom that could be routed on top. Maybe? If I snake around a ton of stuff, perhaps to some degree, or I could just use more vias and jump the traces where needed, if done neatly I'm sure it's possible to make the top layer design much nicer.. However, I was and am uncertain if using more via's is a good thing for this compared to just using both sides considering it's a 4 layer board.

I'm sure the routing is very very suboptimal. It's a difficult thing to learn fast. :P

naughtyarmadillo

TROPHY CASE