That was 2025! 2025 was the year I actually shipped hardware: the ESP32 Rainbow—a modern, full-color riff on the Sinclair Spectrum—crowdfunded, certified, manufactured, and in customers' hands. The economics were brutal (COGS, tariffs, shipping, CE/UKCA), but the community made it worth it. I also went deep on high voltage, made a 10¢ MCU sing and talk, escaped printf hell with USB/JTAG, built a browser serial plotter, fixed broken gadgets, and even let AI pick parts. For 2026: more ESP32 mischief, more joyful builds, and probably more bodge wires than I'd like to admit. 31 December 2025
ESP32-S3 USB UAC I turned my new ESP32‑S3 board into a USB Audio device. After a ninja LED fix and confirming the IMU and charging, I streamed mic audio over Web Serial (with a slick AI-made ‘Audio Studio’) and then via USB UAC. The mic sounds great, but the speaker is crackly over UAC—even though I2S WAV playback is perfectly clean. ESP-IDF worked; Arduino didn’t. Bonus annoyance: macOS vs Windows is a toggle, not a combo. Still, this board passes QA. 26 September 2025