> Between the resulting thermal management issues and reduced battery life, linear regulation is seldom worth the pain.
I'd argue the exact opposite. The article is targeting "enthusiasts", and a very large portion of enthusiast projects are going to be powered by a 5V USB charger and consume in the order of a few 100mA of power.
LDOs are dirt cheap, widely available, have pretty decent output characteristics, and incredibly easy to use. If you have basically unlimited 5V and want 100mA of 3.3V, why not use one?
On the other hand, buck converters require you to actually do some actual engineering. You can't just haphazardly throw in a single IC and expect it to work flawlessly on your first try. You either have to use an (expensive!) fully-integrated module, or do a decent bit of math and part sourcing yourself. Neither option is exactly attractive to a hobbyist building a fairly simple one-off PCB.
I'd argue the exact opposite. The article is targeting "enthusiasts", and a very large portion of enthusiast projects are going to be powered by a 5V USB charger and consume in the order of a few 100mA of power.
LDOs are dirt cheap, widely available, have pretty decent output characteristics, and incredibly easy to use. If you have basically unlimited 5V and want 100mA of 3.3V, why not use one?
On the other hand, buck converters require you to actually do some actual engineering. You can't just haphazardly throw in a single IC and expect it to work flawlessly on your first try. You either have to use an (expensive!) fully-integrated module, or do a decent bit of math and part sourcing yourself. Neither option is exactly attractive to a hobbyist building a fairly simple one-off PCB.