I've noticed that some things can make the price suddenly skyrocket. Certain PCB specifications for one (though couldn't name anything in particular off hand). The one thing that caught me by surprise was that if I wanted to have JLCPCB solder the ESP32 for me the cost would jump by more than double, and the PCB would have to be physically larger. Something about their "Economic" vs. "Standard" PCB assembly where, for reasons I'm not clear on, the ESP32 could only be done under the latter. I opted to solder that component myself, of course.
That's exactly what I did :) and a convenient thing I realised afterwards is that the push-button function of the rotary encoder gives me the ability to turn the thing on and off with my foot!
Hey, author here. There's a line in the digipot datasheet that says the voltage on the A/B/W pins must be within -0.3V to VDD + 0.3V. The fan's line for the wiper pin is 5V, which would fall well outside of that if I gave the digipot's VDD 3.3V.
Fair point, I hadn't thought to consider that aspect of the ESP8266. I mainly opted for the shiny new ESP32-C6 with the idea that I might one day set it up to use Thread instead of WiFi.
Hey, author here. That's correct. The potentiometer has 5V going through it, with a current range of 30-164μA, which fell within limits of the digipot. I opted to use the digipot instead of my own PWM because something else must be doing PWM closer to the motor, where I didn't want to go modifying.
For the sake of answering the parent question with regard to Chezmoi specifically: Chezmoi is a very comprehensive dotfiles manager. It can do a lot of things. More than any other I'm aware of.
More does not necessarily equal better, though. I think that's a matter of personal preference. I tried Chezmoi for a while and ultimately decided it was just a lot more levers at my disposal than I really wanted to even think about.
Dotter, by contrast, is a lot more minimal. Dotter is little more than a symlink manager plus templating engine plus config files to declare what machines need what config.
Chezmoi is all that, and does a lot more: encryption/decryption (even has password manager integrations), automatic push/pull. It's also designed so that you can add or manage files regardless of what your current working directory is (via commands like `chezmoi edit/add`).
In my case, after deciding I wanted to go for the minimal end of things, I almost went for GNU Stow however, I wanted templating functionality and I liked dotter's "packages" system for defining what files a given computer needs.
And very much a personal bias here: I found the learning curve of Chezmoi templates not great. I'm also not a big fan of the fact that Chezmoi relies on you naming your source files in particular ways in order to determine what the target file permissions should be.
I set ESPHome to use IDF under the hood, you can check out my full ESPHome config for this: https://git.ellis.codes/e/esphome-configs/src/branch/main/vo...