I realize that this is absolutely not the place that I should go for this, but I’m hoping someone might have a pointer for me.
I’m currently finalizing my 3rd lamp using WLed (keep giving them as presents). All have gone smoothly from the perspective of flashing prebuilt WLED to ESP8266 boards. However, in trying to flash the latest lamp using esptool.py, it is actually crashing my laptop along the way. I’ve never seen this behavior before and I’m not quite sure where to go to attempt to resolve it. I’m running latest Ubuntu with all latest updates on a Dell XPS 15 9500.
I would really appreciate any suggestions on how I might diagnose/fix this problem.
I pulled the ESP8266 completely out of the lamp and was able to get it flashed. I still have no idea why a USB → Serial setup would ever crash Linux, but at least for now I’m up and running.
Was it just an ESP or other electronics attached? You could have been drawing a lot of current from USB by running it backwards through a buck converter.
Yeah that’s a real good reason. And if you had more than 30 or so LEDs and had current limiter turned off, your laptop was just trying to protect itself.