Single Button Games for the ESP32-C3 0.42 Inch OLED Module #arduino #esp32 - I turn up the heat up here. Beats throb, energy climbs—no words, just pulse, sweat, and lift.

Train Surgery - I took a hilariously loud, 4xAA-hungry toy train and gave it a proper glow-up: dropped an 18650 in the coal car, used a charger/protect/boost board dialed to ~5.5 V, and added a simple series pot as a volume knob. After some careful teardown, polarity sanity checks (center positive!), and an irresponsible amount of hot glue, it’s now rechargeable and actually pleasant to listen to. The motor clatter is the only thing the volume knob can’t tame—but the wheels go round and round, and I’m calling that a win.

I got this feeling bezos is watching - Discovered my Hue switch battery performance is correlated with room temperature after a nifty web scrape of Amazon's device usage history. While it's a given that batteries are temperature-sensitive, actual data from my own living room provided a neat confirmation, graphing a daily pattern. Wanted to go green with a rechargeable lithium coin cell, but the voltage risk to the ATmega256RFR2 on the PCB is a no-go. For now, it's back to the humdrum world of regular coin cells and unexciting battery charts. Dive into the video for a deeper geek-out on this!

No Power? No Problem! A Wireless Pi Doom Machine - In my latest wireless charging experiments, I got my hands on a set of wireless charging PCBs and dove into testing different voltage inputs and their efficiency levels. It was interesting to realise that the 5V input managed to provide a decent efficiency of 73%, while 12V input struggled and heated the receiver board excessively. With the perks and limits of this setup explored, I took a whirl at creating a wireless Pi Doom machine. It worked like a charm! However, I quickly noticed the need to split charging and boost board into two different modules - a project to look forward to. Half the fun is getting there! Check out the video [here](https://youtu.be/glCIuOoFm7U) for more detail on the project.

I Made My ESP32-S3 Faster by Optimizing for SIZE — Not Speed - I tuned a hot path on an ESP32-S3 and found the counter-intuitive winner: optimizing for size (-Os) beat optimizing for speed (-O2). On this chip, flash latency and instruction cache behavior dominate—tighter code stays in cache, misses less, and runs faster. Bumping the CPU to 240 MHz, switching flash to QIO, and maxing caches helped too, but -Os still edged out -O2. As always, benchmark your own workload—yours might differ.

Whats wrong with my lightbulbs - In the saga of my beleaguered light bulbs, I've found myself knee-deep in electrical components and a fair bit of frustration. Of the four LED bulbs I invested in, only one survives unscathed, while another's flickering demise is imminent. My investigation revealed overheating bases, resilient capacitors, and an interesting LED filament setup. Ultimately, it seems one LED strip in the bulbs went open circuit, setting off a cascading failure. It's been a journey through minor electrical engineering heartbreak, with some messy disassembly and a sprinkle of high voltage excitement!