Well, today I learnt a lesson. Watch where you shove your scope probes. Thank goodness I didn't do any more damage than I did. This is my best explanation for what happened to me. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, I'm keen to learn about my mistakes!

I've been probing the output of the MOSFET now for quite a while, watching the waveform that is being created, it looks pretty. I haven't had my FTDI board plugged in now for a while, I haven't done any firmware updates or anything for quite some time. In any case, I thought that I should plug it in and upload a new lua script to play around with tcp and the like. Turns out this was a really bad idea.

I've watched the video by Dave Jones from the EEVBlog titled How NOT to blow up your oscilloscope a while back, I probably should have paid a little more attention! Turns out I made a rookie mistake. I had made sure that my power supply was isolated. There is no ground pin on the cable, and i probed it just to make sure. This meant to me that I could probe around the board as much as I liked! That is, until I plugged my USB cable in. Fail. When I plugged it in, I heard a pop, then Windows making a noise telling me that my USB device had disconnected. Turns out I've shagged both my ESP8266 and my FTDI Breakout board. The ESP8266 gets nice and toasty really quickly when I have 3.3v plugged into it, and the blue light stays on. The FTDI breakout just isnt even recognised anymore.

I'm a bit annoyed with myself, I should have known better. I even checked the power supply to make sure I was alright, the USB cables ground didn't even cross my mind. You live and learn. I have another FTDI breakout on the way now, and I've soldered up a new ESP8266 breakout. An expensive (both time and money) mistake, but it could have been much worse.

On another note, before i screwed everything, I made up this video. I'm still not used to hearing my own voice. Sorry for sending everyone to sleep ;)

It goes through what the waveform look like connected to a typical 12v iron core transformer. It isn't as good as I was hoping, but it should be enough. Any LED light worth its weight will have additional smoothing capacitors built in to be able to cope with the small voltage drop. I'm thinking it might be worth my while adding an additional footprint for an extra capacitor on my first prototype just in case.

It might be a while before I can post any meaningful updates now that I've done this, I need to wait for the slow boat to arrive here in Australia with my FTDI breakout on it. I guess I'll start working on putting all this together on a prototype board.

I've also been meaning to post up a new picture of my setup. I cut a piece of clear perspex to mount each of the boards on, I got a bit sick of them floating around my desk. So here it is (original):