I ended up diving deep into motor dynamics this time, specifically trying to figure out how torque and stall current actually interact. I learned that when a motor faces too much resistance and completely stalls, it basically stops acting like a motor and starts behaving like a giant resistor, which causes the current to absolutely spike. That made me realize how critical the motor driver is for handling those sudden surges. If the motor stalls, a low-quality driver just won’t be able to deliver that massive current and will probably fry, so I had to pivot and choose a much more capable driver. I spent the rest of my time in KiCad designing a much better electronics layout to handle those loads, using ChatGPT to do a lot of the heavy research and figure out the exact specs I needed.