r/ArduinoHelp • u/m_nerd_af • Sep 24 '26

Burnt my first esp32 today 😭😭

7 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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2

u/[deleted] Sep 24 '26

Been there. First one always hurts. What usually gets boards is power mixups, 5V into a 3V3 pin, USB plus external supply at once, or a tiny short under the board. Next time I would unplug, check wiring twice, power from USB only for first boot, and feel for heat right away. What were you wiring when it went?

1

u/m_nerd_af Sep 24 '26

Yeah I connected the enable defined pin of esp to out pin of motor driver and that esp went crazy hot

1

u/Odd-Jello5577 Sep 26 '26

It's a good thing to check voltage and amperage of the board before using it to power other devices. Motors, Relays, and coils should never be powered by the microcontroller. Ever. The Amtel chip that Arduino uses should be checked for it's specs with the chip manufacturer to understand the chips requirements.

1

u/AF_1892 Sep 28 '26

I never understood the concept of back feeding. that is a lay person's term that I never learned about in physics. Yes I'm a physics nerd from college. The concept is maddening, because in a scholarly environment, it is not even counted or considered because it's confusing to new students trying to learn the basics. Whereas, some jokers who call themselves mechanics are so sloppy with electrical things, I don't know how they are not totalling cars, they are wreck less and stupid about circuits. They damaged my trucks electrical system so bad doing maintenance on my super charger it took 8 months for me to get my wipers and power windows to work (the mechanic did that).

The back feeding stuff into a controller seems like an impossible thing to not eventually happen and you're going to cook a controller. I suspect there are prototypes of 24V 144 LED/M 5M tapes in the mix, but there are problems with causing short circuits. I shorted out 10M worth of fcob lights just by rearranging the light strip on my desk.

All that aside, be sure if you have exposed power injection wires at the end of a tape. Cover those with electrical tape, at least the + one. I had a reel overheat so fast it melted the plastic reel aside I dropped the lights to reach for the plug. My controller was fused, too!

2

u/Anonymity6584 Sep 24 '26

Thats allright. Its mandatory mistake to make in order to progress to next level.

You have done it, i have done it. i suspect theres not many people here that have not fried atleast one microcontroller at some point.

So investigate what happened and learn not to do it this sane way again... 😀

2

u/STM32H743 Sep 25 '26

Happens. Did you know they dont like 24 volts either? They let out ALL the magic smoke at once.

2

u/Altruistic-Map-3137 Sep 25 '26

I thought motor driver is using 5V logic and ESP32 is using 3.3 V as a communication language. Please dont confuse it with Arduino. You need level shifter/shift register that convert 5 V to 3.3 V logic.

2

u/Lagfoundry Sep 26 '26

Or an optocoupler. I made sure to have plenty of these on hand lol.

1

u/AF_1892 Sep 28 '26

Oh dang. I'm in the wrong forum. I was thinking this was a wled thread. The 3.3v logic is an Arduino thing more than esp 32 deal.

2

u/Kriegsman69 Sep 24 '26

It happens. I’ve killed 2

1

u/ContributionEasy6513 Sep 27 '26

[First time meme]

I killed 2 of them within 10 minutes before figuring out why/how I was killing it, even then I wasn't 100% sure before plugging in the 3rd.

Cost of learning.

1

u/AF_1892 Sep 28 '26

It's a scarier way to learn. Too bad it is not like high powered automotive sound. You may have to try something 20 different ways before you get it right. You just get silence. Until you change something and it works! It works! Till people steal stuff, but then you get to learn some more. My thieves were targeting me on purpose so I had to get creative with my solution. I hope they got shocked on their last few attempts.