DEVLOG 003
I worked on soldering the esp32 and the stepper motor driver together using a simple perfboard. It was my first time soldering a perfboard and it was incredibly difficult and frustrating! I eventually got better, and figured out that I did not have to use so much solder, and was able to control the flow better by removing excess solder with solder wick. I often used my multimeter to check continuity with each pin, and to check that no pins were accidentally over lapping at the solder, which many were, and I had to fix. I eventually resorted to using a small xacto knife to cut the very tiny bridges at the base of the point, where the soldering iron could not reach by itself, without messing up the surrounding solder. It was very frustrating, and I really wanted to quit around half way through when all of the solder got stuck in a big blob, as I thought it simply was not possible to make this kind of perfboard soldering with my setup, but I kept trying and it worked! The esp32 mounts to one side of the perfboard, and four of the pins in a row were aligned with the same pins on the driver, very simply, and then also very simply, the ground connection was perfboarded over similarly using a much more separated single line, and the 5v pin was not even on the perfboard, so i very simply used a small black wire to connect it to the perfboard, and then connected it with solder like usual.

For the official guide of this, I have chosen not to make a pcb for this, even though it would be incredibly easy to make, and would be way simpler to solder the esp32 and driver to, as many people who make this type of ultra budget tracker, likely wont even have a soldering iron, so in the official github repo, I will show the different methods that you can do this, either with some incredibly simple standard arduino dupont wires, or this simple, slightly more compact, perfboard version. In the future, if this becomes popular, I will definitely consider making a simple, modular PCB, and getting them in bulk and selling them for very cheap and shipping for very cheap, so that more people have access to it.

I then got the program to work, because it did not initially work, because the wires must have been flipped when I used the jumper wires, so since it is just some basic logic pins, I can very easily change the pins on the code, without any change to the performance.

I will now work on the box that will mount this setup to the bottom of the tracker, with some storage space for all of the extra stepper motor wires, along with easy accessibility to the other I/O pins for expandability, like adding a dew heater or small red LEDs for convenience

I will also work on completing the full cad model, as well as the advanced webpage controller system. Very fun session, and I am incredibly excited to design the webpage and finally get to make this project look better on the outside.