What borad did you buy which includes the oled?

Well, a switch comes in handy should you have many on-board peripherals though.

So you’re saying that the battery leakage (18650) rate is still even higher than the standby current? Good to know.

Yeah but I also like how much easier it is to test using { an } on seperate lines too.. so basically an if statement will execute 1 line of code... unless you use { and }.. however, if the next line is a { it does the whole block"... so if you wanna comment out an if statement and run it if the condition is false.. u can just comment out the if statement and leave the { and } for scope purposes.

Thanks! Yup, I'd do a *LOT* better if I picked a theme and stuck with it!

@@DavesGarage actually I like the variety

Many thanks!

You can do it! Have some fun!

Thanks! I'll try the header thing, that seems a lot easier!

Seconding this

@@DavesGarage I too will upvote this

Also, don't forget the gigabytes of bloat, unnecessary long compiling times and the dependency/versioning hell[1] that you get for free with PlatformIO. Yes, all the things we love and like when working with MICRO controllers (!ironic!). [1] What they force you into, their package dependency system ... they seem to forgot within the build system: Dependency checking. What a botch-up, lol. Setting up a build system with a compiler and thinking about libraries before using them won't hurt anyone. In contrary, you learn more about the inner workings of the build system, think BEFORE making avoidable errors and wasting time over your project, and learn more about the architecture you are working with. All for free. You even don't have to give up editing a fancy magic text file. Just call it "notes";)

I’d love to see more about the ESP-Prog. I’ve used it and it’s saved me lots of headaches, but it’s also fickle to set up, and there are some sketches where it simply will not work at all. I’d love for someone more knowledgeable than me to explain some of the voodoo, the limitations, etc.

... sorry, forgot to add. Any stuff on tasks on the ESP32 you wish to share would be great. I must admit my implementations thus far do not include any sort of locking or semaphores. I just deal with that in code - dont use the same LED (pin) in two different tasks. Hope you are having a good day :)

You bet! Hope you enjoy and hope there's some appetite out there!

Start with python, C++ is much harder, and at this point it is a boutique language. BTW I started with C++ but I don't advise that for anyone starting these days

@@steveb7600 i have hard time believe these easy to use languages don't use more ram. why isn't windows 12 in python? i was told REAL men\woman program in raw machine code?

@@cdoublejj no operating system is written in a high level language, but writing an OS isn’t a typical programming job. Also RAM really isn’t an issue anymore with languages but compile/transpile speeds and code size are. If you are really curious as to why you wouldn't write an OS in a high level language I can explain that, just let me know.

@@steveb7600 i believe the high level answer is that drivers in python aren't a thing lol. though while i tease and challenge your word there actually puts perspective as far as task at hand vs languages used.

@@cdoublejj People who started back in the late '70's or '80's would probably have programmed their home computer in BASIC. To turn on a relay we would have used the POKE command and to take a sensor reading we would have used PEEK. The advantage of BASIC is that the programs run straight away, there is no compiling or downloading. You simply save your work when you reach a good stage. Using C++ puts some massive steps between you and the result. Dave makes it look easy here but home computers were much easier than this except more limited. You could do worse than go back to the place we started but use an emulator. I'm using XRoar to emulate my old Dragon 32 machine but there are ones for Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum. You may quickly grow out of it, the whole scene back then was about 6 years in total and about 2 years per machine. Use this as a learning experience to give yourself confidence in BASIC the same way we did. Then move on to C or a higher level language. High level languages with the right librarys when correctly chosen make writing programs easier and faster. However C is probably 40 times better performance and Assembler 40 times better than C. But when your computer is a million times more powerful than in the 1980's it matters a lot less how fast it run than how easy it is to write.

These are very much less complex than a PI which is really a complete general purpose computer. It's irritating to me when a whole computer is used to read a sensor and operate a light. These ESP32 are much better because they only hold the code for the thing you actually want it to do. That feel better to me.

@@wayland7150 Using a Pi would be ridiculous - I haven't done that, I've used Pi Pico's. It's what I had laying around and combined with a PIR, Infra red and 120 colour leds, 80 white led's, I made a rather cool light which lights the room if required or lights the corner with dozens of effects.

I loved the reference to PDP 11. I used the first Unix/C systems as a programmer at bell labs.

Its likely the same chip, ESP Wroom. They haven't added many pins to the newer chips

He has some great videos on this, look up his FastLED tutorials

Thanks so much!

Yep, that often helps. I think I’ve just used 1μF, though. Keeps the EN pin low long enough for the programmer to set the IO0 pin (boot mode) to bootloader mode before it starts up.

Just remember there's a V2 and a V3 and right now PlatformIO doesn't support the V3 quite yet, but I suspect it's imminent.

@@DavesGarage Oh thanks so much Dave, I didn't know that, I'm very new to this new technology, I came from the old school of the 1980's & 90's when I was an Electrical Engineering student. I understand the circuit design, in fact it was my best subject without trying but software is where I fall down, it's difficult for me to grasp. It's easy starting on the hardware end of a design but to design the software side to work with it takes me like 10 times as long to deal with. Keep up the good work mate, I like those colorful light chasers you made in the background by the way too.