Before continuing with the PCB, I wanted to do a quick and stress free session where I tested firmware that would make the motors run.
Safe to say, it was not quick and stress free.

I initially tested the servo code on a mini mg90 servo since it was safer than testing with the esc which is powered by a big scary LiPo battery. I wasted 45 minutes with the firmware only to learn that the battery pack I used was drained. (All 4 AA batteries fell to 0.9v…)

Then I managed to get the espservo library to work, but for some reason it kept crashing the entire code whenever I tried using pinMode(). I still don’t know why that happened.

I switched to controlling the servo using the ledc api instead, which worked much better, and was quite fun to figure out. After succeeding in moving the mini servo, the ESC + motor gave me some issues. For safety purposes, ESCs have to be armed before they spin. To learn exactly how to calibrate it, I dug up a datasheet of the ESC, and finally got the ESC to spin the motor.

Overall I learned:

• ESCs aren’t as dumb as I thought they were
• ledc api exists
• I still hate programming