Clock Radio
Parts
I just ordered parts for the clock radio. Somewhat optimistically, as I haven't finished the board layout. Stocks are dwindling faster than they're replenishing, and it's looking like if I waited until I finished, some of these parts might not ship until late November.
Thankfully, the really problematic stuff like the ESP32 and the audio chips I had ordered previously, so the only thing I'm missing is the CP2102N USB serial adapter. They had a handful last week, and they were gone on Sunday.
EDITED
It's not strictly necessary for development as I can wire in an external USB-serial converter but I think what I'll do is just buy a dirt cheap adapter on Amazon and cannibalize it. Some of those are basically just a board, a CP2102N, and half a dozen components. Real grade-A garbage electrical design. I saw one that didn't bother using the dedicated indicator pins for TX/RX LEDs. It just wired the LEDs directly into the signal pins.
Oooh, nevermind. These cheap boards only have the older CP2102. That doesn't have the indicator outputs. Well that's fine. All I need it to do is serial.
Oh hey, look what I’ve got on my ESP32-C3 eval board. }:->
I bet this thing wouldn’t care if I swapped out the older version. It really wouldn’t matter but the N has some charge control signaling that I want to use.
The C3 doesn't even need it, technically. Unlike the earlier versions, it has an onboard USB UART/JTAG module. You can see a series of unpopulated pads northeast of the CP2102N. Those will reroute the USB data lines to the C3 itself. I'm guessing it's just there because every other ESP dev board has it so why not? Also it preserves the existing DTR/RTS boot programming sequence so if your solution uses that you can test it.