DEVLOG 005 - Second Touch Sensor & Emotion System

Added a second capacitive touch sensor on a new
GPIO pin dedicated entirely to emotions.

How It Works

Built a full gesture detection system on the new
sensor:

◆ Single tap → excited
◆ Hold for 800ms → cozy
◆ Rapid tap 3+ times → mad

Each emotion has 5 or 6 distinct face variants
that cycle using weighted random probabilities
so it never shows the same reaction twice in
a row.

◈ Mad - red angry eyes in different shapes:
wide glare, tiny squint, psycho stare,
disgusted droop

◈ Excited - big round happy eyes, bouncy
small eyes, wide open stare

◈ Cozy - half closed drowsy eyes, warm round
soft eyes, tiny sleepy eyes

Emotions auto expire after 6 seconds and return
to the default idle face automatically.

Spent a long time writing the code, fixing
errors, getting everything working and then
the compiled firmware came out at 101% of the
ESP32’s flash limit and wouldn’t upload.
Couldn’t just scrap it after all that work so
I started diagnosing what was eating the space.

The two biggest culprits:

◈ HTTPClient and ArduinoJson together were
pulling in around 60–80KB of overhead just
from the libraries alone

How I Fixed It

◆ Replaced HTTPClient and ArduinoJson with a
raw WiFiClient socket connection and three
tiny manual JSON parsers using strstr and
atof no library needed at all

◆ Replaced every cos and sin math call with
precomputed fixed point lookup tables stored
in PROGMEM completely removed the float
math library dependency

◆ Wrapped all string literals in F() to keep
them in flash instead of RAM

Got the binary down under the limit without
cutting a single feature. Everything still
works exactly the same, it just actually
fits on the board now.

Still needs some tuning though the emotion
faces need a bit more work to feel right and
there are a few things here and there that
need cleaning up. The structure and foundation
is solid but it’s not fully polished yet.
More to come on that in the next log.