Devlog 5: Wires and Code!

Hey guys! Welcome to my 5th devlog in this series.
This devlog is quite major as you can see by the 7 hours spent on it so lets go over the details.

Wiring

I have finally gotten most of the wiring done for this project. Unfortunately, I was not able to get my PCA9865 yet, hopefully I will get it sometime soon, but in the meantime I found a fix.
What is my wiring strategy?
I know 2 things. Power and signal.
I tried to first feed power to my ESP32 and then to servos, but my servos are very power hungry, and this didnt work.
Turns out, on my power supply, the male pins are much much more powerful than the power supplied to my breadboard rails. This presents a unique challenge, as I have to conserve my 5v power slots.
I also found out that no matter what I do, it is still too little power to handle all my servos, and so I came up with a solution.
For my signal, this was easy. I hooked up my 4 stepper motors to my ULN2003 module, and then one signal wire to each servo!

The programming

What is the solution you may ask? Creating everything in steps! By doing this, Instead of setting my servos directly 0-180, I set it 0-180 but in steps of 10 every X milliseconds. This decreases the overall power requirement, allowing my arm to work under very low power!
I implemented this in my code with a scheduler that whenever my inverse kinematics are updated, it starts a cycle of moving servos.

My next devlog will cover my end effector! Stay tuned!