The voltage regulator is only used to generate the 3.3V supply for the ESP. But OP is using the 5V from the input of the regulator to power the LEDs.

At max it is wasting about 0.7W if the 400mA max current is right. But it will still get hot due to the current draw of the ESP. Even at half of the max. rated current this device is probably 30-40 degrees above your ambient temperature.

I have never used an ESP but as far as I can tell, you are right. There is no component involved for the 5V. Some boards have a diode and a fuse between VBUS (5V USB) and the 5V rail on the board, but that is not the case for the board in your picture.

The black component with “512” is just a pull-down resistor for one of the CC lines of the USB connector. This should not get particularly warm.

The brownish thing is the input capacitor of the voltage regulator. It can get a little warm due to ripple currents, but I wouldn’t expect a lot of heat.

Are you sure it is not the black 5-pin voltage regulator for the ESP? As far as I know those ESPs can be a bit power hungry depending on what you have enabled (e.g. WiFi).

Maybe you can check the temperature without your LED matrix connected and see if it is hot as well.

I also use an NTFS partion for shared data, even though I haven’t booted into Windows for a year or something. To me the best solution is currently to auto-mount the whole NTFS partion to something like /mnt/data using the /etc/fstab file. I additionally use bind mounts to show all the content e.g. of the shared documents folder /mnt/data/documents in a specific folder in my home directory like ~/Documents/shared

Is this some sort of insider I am not aware of? I always see these kind of replies and I never understand them. Why even write anything if you don’t have anything meaningful to add to the conversation? This is a genuine question to both of you. I mean, yes, it might be true that everything is fine and dandy if you follow good security practices? But how does that help a beginner? Its like saying driving a car with manual transmission is easy. You just need to know the numbers from 1 to 6 and that a higher number makes the car go faster. Even though this might be technically true, it doesn’t help anybody.

If you are just using your phone, FitoTrack or OpenTracks might be the right thing for you. I don’t know about the added weight thing though.

Thanks for the tip, I will check it out.

File Explorer

I haven’t checked in a while, but I am still using CX File Explorer because I didn’t find a FOSS alternative I like. Maybe it is just because I am used to it, but one thing I really like is the network feature that you can access local shares of a NAS.

I am not an excessive note-taking guy, but I am using Notesnook for some time now and it does everything I needed so far.

That’s the right answer. I couldn’t find a poll that explicitly states it on my quick search, but if I am not mistaken I saw a poll in TV lately that showed an uncertainty of about 2-3%. It just makes no sense to list parties that are below that value.