I finished drilling all of the holes in the aluminum plate, sanded everything down a bit, and mounted all of the parts. I wired up the motor controller & all of the peripherals I currently have (ADXL345 accelerometer, current sensor) and added a potentiometer for motor control. After running the motor a few times I encountered an issue where the high EMI being generated by the motor power lines was interfering with the ESP32 and the other peripherals; I still have not yet found a good solution for electromagnetic isolation. The issue took so much time to resolve. My new worst nightmare is reading the serial output of the ESP32 and seeing “i2c hardware timeout” or “i2c software timeout” or “gpio _ is not usable; maybe conflict with others”. I may just use a separate ESP32 for the peripherals (one ESP for motor one for sensors) to isolate the sensitive power lines from any motor disturbance. I accidentally ran the motor at full power (~13V) and I think it must have hit like 12000 RPM, which instantly generated an extremely high-pitched noise from the gearbox. My dad was watching and got scared ;). Some of the teeth on the sun gear got a bit scratched up from that. I used a box knife to shave some of the teeth down a little and it runs smoother now with less noise; I may apply some grease later when I actually go to run the rig for a long period of time (probably 5-6 hours) to stress-test the gearbox.