Hey, morning everyone,
after setting up a 12-LED WS2812B ring with my DOIT Devkit V1 board, it worked perfectly fine for 15-20 minutes (including HA integration, changing colours and brightness, switching it on and off etc from the UI). When I then wanted to add an effect to the YAML, the esphome commandline wasn’t able to connect to the board via USB anymore after compiling. The board also showed up as unavailable in HA and my router showed it as offline (no IP assigned), and therefore I also cannot connect to it via WiFi (anymore).
I found a lot of examples on the web where in small projects the power for the LEDs comes directly from the ESPs, and additional power source was mostly used for big project with multiple meters of LED strips, but I’m now still wondering if my setup fried the ESP board.
My wiring looks like this:
Power for the ring comes from the VIN pin, this one is connected to the 5V line of the USB connector with a SS12 diode inbetween. I use this setup for another project where the dedicated 3.3V are not enough, with a 433mhz sender and receiver, there it works like a charm (but obviously with way less current draw).
Ground is the pin right next to it, and for Data I use pin 25.
The YAML looks like this. The working version was exactly this, without the last 5 lines for the effect. But as mentioned: I wasn’t even able to flash the last version because the connection to the device doesn’t work anymore.
esphome:
name: terrarium
esp32:
board: esp32doit-devkit-v1
framework:
type: arduino
# Enable logging
logger:
# Enable Home Assistant API
api:
password: ""
ota:
password: ""
wifi:
ssid: "XXXXXXXX"
password: "XXXXXXXX"
# Enable fallback hotspot (captive portal) in case wifi connection fails
ap:
ssid: "Terrarium Fallback Hotspot"
password: "XXXXXXXX"
captive_portal:
light:
- platform: neopixelbus
type: GRB
variant: WS2812X
pin: 25
num_leds: 12
name: "LED ring 1"
id: led_ring_1
effects:
- addressable_twinkle:
name: "Twinkle"
twinkle_probability: 5%
progress_interval: 4ms
The USB2Serial bridge still does pop up in the windows device manager of my laptop when I connect the board, but I wasn’t able to get any log output from COM4. I only tried the Arduino serial monitor for that though. I manage all my ESP nodes via the esphome commandline on a windows laptop, no usage of the esphome dashboard within HA.
Oh, I just realised one additional difference to my usual ESP setup: with my previous projects, I flashed the first YAML to the ESP board, and after booting/WiFiconnecting, HA showed a notificication that a new device was discovered. With this project I didn’t get a notification, so I manually added a new esphome integration and gave terrarium.local as the host address, then it worked like always. So there was at least a small difference to how I did it so far. All my boards are the DOIT devkit V1 boards from the same supplier.
Taking the 50mA per LED, the ring would sum up to 600mA max consumption, so I don’t see how that would kill the whole ESP board, especially as the VIN pin is more or less directly connected to the USB 5V line.
About the setup “in the room”: the board and the ring sat on the table the whole time without me touching them or changing anything to the wiring. The only connection was the USB cable to the laptop, and that worked fine for the whole testing time.
I’m really a bit lost here, and it could very well be a faulty board, but I would like to rule out anything else before I fry the next one 
Thanks a lot in advance, Cheers!
