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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 14th, 2024

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  • That is something I would disagree with. Especially when it comes to battery powered tools which seems to be everything nowadays.

    If you go with one of the big brands you are almost guaranteed to get a spare part later. If you only use your drill once a year, the battery might be dead in a few years if you don’t take care of it. Of course your battery might cost the same as a no name drill, but that is still a fair point IMO.

    Now that you have a drill maybe you need a saw later. If you went with a big brand they typically have a large range of devices that work with the same batteries. So you can reuse your battery from the drill and also don’t need another charger for that single device. This is also not limited to tools only. Maybe you need a light or a battery powered radio for something totally unrelated.


  • The voltage regulator is only used to generate the 3.3V supply for the ESP. But OP is using the 5V from the input of the regulator to power the LEDs.

    At max it is wasting about 0.7W if the 400mA max current is right. But it will still get hot due to the current draw of the ESP. Even at half of the max. rated current this device is probably 30-40 degrees above your ambient temperature.


  • I have never used an ESP but as far as I can tell, you are right. There is no component involved for the 5V. Some boards have a diode and a fuse between VBUS (5V USB) and the 5V rail on the board, but that is not the case for the board in your picture.

    The black component with “512” is just a pull-down resistor for one of the CC lines of the USB connector. This should not get particularly warm.

    The brownish thing is the input capacitor of the voltage regulator. It can get a little warm due to ripple currents, but I wouldn’t expect a lot of heat.

    Are you sure it is not the black 5-pin voltage regulator for the ESP? As far as I know those ESPs can be a bit power hungry depending on what you have enabled (e.g. WiFi).

    Maybe you can check the temperature without your LED matrix connected and see if it is hot as well.



  • I couldn’t agree more.

    And I can only reiterate, with my initial comment I was not attacking you personally or trying to guilt you into doing something. I also don’t like when people do that. In fact, it wasn’t even that much about saving water in the shower. It is just this blocking attitude of: I don’t do it, others should start first without even thinking about it, that you can often read in these threads which bugged me at first.

    By your comments you showed that you actually thought about it and came to the conclusion that the impact is little and there are more important topics you want to address, which is a totally fair point.


  • That is not the point I was trying to make. As I said, it is not the end of the world just because someone leaves the shower on for a few seconds longer than necessary and there are obviously way more important topics we need to address.

    To be honest when I saw the question I haven’t thought about climate at all. I turn it off for as long as I can remember and was curious how others are doing it. But everytime something comes up that has to do with saving energy/ressources there are people saying: I don’t change because my personal impact doesn’t matter. To exaggerate my point one person changing one tiny thing of course doesn’t make a difference, but if 8 billion people change 10 tiny things it can have an impact. At some point we have to start making a change.

    However, I totally get your point about the industry polluting our planet even though they knew better decades ago. And now everyone has to suffer from their mistakes or rather greed.


  • By that logic nobody has to do anything, because you can always find someone who has a higher impact that should start first.

    • Why stop driving my petrol car, trucks or container ships have a much higher impact
    • Why stop flying around the globe for no particular reason, Taylor Swift should stop
    • Why should I start energy saving, cryptominers should stop

    Don’t get me wrong, you leaving the shower on for 10s longer than necessary will not be the end of the world. It’s just this mentality of: I am pro climate change (policies) as long as I don’t have to change anything about my own life, that you can hear way to often.