@astra_celestine

HI SO WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING FOR THE PAST 20 HACKATIME HOURS??? Great question well, mostly PCBing. Since my last log, I’ve finished the module PCBs and ordered 20 of them, they’ve arrived! yay (thank god i live in a manufacturign country). so i started designing the main board( the shit that the ESP32, arduinos, all the other shenanigans, and the module pcbs are gonna be wired up to!).

also sidenote (hold on i forgot …) what was it again… hold on oh right uh so after i finished the main board (which btw was pretty damn awesome but GOD it was a pain in the ass, elaborated in next paragraph), so apparently the manufacturer i was using for the 20 pcbs (they sent me 25 uh thanks for that i guess), ran out of materials so that’s great… thanks vietnamese customs control. so like i gotta scourage trhough facebook to find another manufacturer and one responoded yay but they’re like 2 provinces away aw :( so delivery’s gonna take 1 day.. bleghhhh

kay anyway about the PCB designage, god i jeninly cannot find any footprints for the ESP32, and arduinos i have so uh i just winged it … i also then found out net labels actually link everything togehter, so i had to relabel everything… my stupid ass did that by changing the pin NUMBER. so i found out nothing worked so i had to go back and swap pin numbers for pin NAMES and that took a damn while…

yeah uh okay so i also realized that the hole i had for the thingy (and by thingy i mean the uh ) (what’s it called) hall effect sensor is 3mm too low… gah so i adjusted it, i also made room for the pcb which the thing’s supposed to be attached to. OH BTW SPEAKING OF WHICH, for the design of the pCb to work, i’d have to desolder a buncha shit just to put the pins back on the other side of the modules’ board. so uh that’s great
anyway soldering and desoldering for the first time … it went terribly at first but then i got the hang of it and it was really easy surprisingly… then i just had to fuck up by accidentally severing the trace to pIN1, eh i’ll fix it later via jumper cables,… one end is SMD though so that’s gonna be fun /s

i also made some changes like making the middle portion of the thingamajig (CAD for the case) have holes on the bottom which the things can slide into for stability, and hollowing out the right part which only serves to hold in the thingy (mount the wheel), so now it won’t be an expensive monolith of plastique 🇫🇷.

Kaboom, anyway seeya out!

not bothered to write shit
uh tldr: designed the 3d model for the case of 1 module; it was… eh. could be better, will redesign, got it printed, sanded a bit, boom fits wellsomething something pcb wil rpint tmr

okay so, where do we start
so, this morning, i went down to the hardware shop below my house, and
uh yeah bought some stuff, screws, wire cutter, sandpaper
went back home, first thing i did was to cut open a wire to prep for the
power supply, uh ouch, cut myself :(

anyway, moved over the circuit to a new breadboard that gives me more
space to work with and that’s nice and all,

the highlight of today so far is prolly me panicking about how i’m gonna
make 16 of these modules. besides for GND and VCC, each motor takes up 4
I/O GPIO ports, and the sensor another input GPIO port.
the ESP32 doesn’t have that many, and a lot are either input only or
used for other system functions. uh i had 3 options basically, get 4
more ESP32’s, 2 more Arduino Mega’s, or some GPIO expanders (which uh
idk how to use shrug emojji). i opted for arduino mega type shit

kaboom

okay so it’s like 2 3 fuggin AM rn and i’m burnt asf but uh yeah basically since my last log (CADing), i did the thing (uhh hall effect / magnet sensor) so yeah cool awesome

didn’t work at first, but uh after i did something (idk what i did, i just unplugged it a few times), it works! positive is 0 and neg is 1 for some reason :/ eh whatever i can just put a ! in front of it

anyway uh yeah i put an LED diode between GPIO26 and GND because sillies and proof that i am NOT stupid and i actually know how to do shit yay
kaboom see ya next time goobers

cool okay so after i got my motors working, i decided to start desiggning the cad because realistically i wouldn’t be able to do much besides just testing if shit works without a proper casing,

realized i was recording the wrong damn tab for like half an hour, iuhh i stopped the thing and fahh lost half an hour of tracked work time :/ oh well
anyway uh yeah cool i got the main case for the motor down, i’ll go down to the hardware store near me tmr and buy heat cast inserts so i can measure and do shit yay
thumbs up emoji

Okay so cool! First hardware project in a long long time.

I started off plugging the damn ESP32 and the other stuff into my breadboard, no lights turned on, my laptop didn’t recognize it, so I lowkey kinda panicked because I thought my ESP32 broke before I even got to use it. I scouraged thru the mess of cables in a random ass drawer in my house to find a USB-A to USB-C/Micro-B/A cable, and that somehow worked despite my $30 official Apple cable not working (idk i searched it up, apparently it has something to do with like standards). so that worked.

problem: i have a mac, and i could not be bothered to install stuff on my thinkpad running arch btw, so uh i grabbed a cheap 2-cent USB-A to C adapter i bought for Daydream, and uh yeah it worked, except for some reason, no matter how hard i tried, the motor only vibrated, no rotation. i thought it was broken, and tried a diff one. didn’t work also, did some measuring with multimeter, nothing worked. so i just gave up and hoped for the best usign a diff tutorial, and i recoded everything, and it worked somehow? weird shit idk….
but yeah thumbs up emoji gah