Worked a lot on the differential:
Also started designing the ESC’s PCB design
Since the last log I’ve removed the things from the wheels, as I don’t know how it’ll rotate and don’t want the wheels to crash to the chassis, so I’ll leave more space and holes and print it after I have the main frame and the tires and steering and know how it rotates, how much place it takes
Also worked like an hour on the ESC’s PCB layout so when I’ll continue you’ll see a bit of development in the PCB design compared to the previous record.
In addition decided to make differential and steering DIY with the help of JLC CNC machining, as I doubt regular 3D printed ones would work and don’t want to buy (assume you also wouldn’t like :P)
So started planning the differential of the RC car, see the result on the images!
Worked a lot on the 3D design, to make it look good, designed a lot.
In the previous frame I left too much space for the tires, especially at the front ones. Now, I corrected it to make the hole just fit the tires, also have an other driving mechanism in my mind.
I was thinking about whether I need metal gearbox and differential, as it will have to deliver a lot of power and the motor’s high RPM. I don’t have experience, but probably a 3D printed version won’t make it, not durable enough, so I’ll have to buy a metal one and fit into the 3d model.
Continued working on ESC, read the bigger part of the IC’s docs. It’s just so complex all the SPI communications, registers.
In addition, I still don’t know what exact parameters to use for some capacitors, resistors, inductors, as in the documentation, they just give an example application for 30A cont. current with 12V input.
The huge difference is that I want to make it handle much larger current as high as 50A and I’ll power it from a battery that doesn’t have a stable input voltage. It’ll vary between 16.8-14.0 V
If anyone can help, I’d really appreciate it! Schematic among hte screenshots
I use the DRV8305 gate driver IC with STL160N4F7 MOSFETs I know it’s much stronger compared to what needed, but I want to make sure
hey everyone,
I will copy the more important previous posts from Macondo. If you’re interested all posts are amonf the pictures as screenshots. You can also find plenty of logs on the project’s github page.
29th of July 2026
hey everyone,
today I was experimenting a lot with speech recognition with python’s SpeechRecognition library and available Vosk offline engines. I found an example code on a guy’s vlog and modified it to my engine, but all I discovered is just that my laptop is too weak to run it so I guess that’s it. Unfortunately it took another 60 minutes to read github readme-s, the library’s documentation, vlogs, vosk’s official page just get to know that.
Screenshots among the attachments.
3rd of July 2026
hey,
I have a window a few buttons and a pop up window. My first and only feature yet is that it can change the size of the window based on user input and changes it’s config file that it handles itself.
It was a hell a lot of work to make that config text file work… It always had some problem e.g. when it was writing the new settings it wanted string not list, or the \n that signed a new line stayed there so it didn’t recognize the settings in the conf file or couldn’t apply it.
To sum it up, it was a lot of time, but now I will work on its main feature.
Continued to work on ESC, gathered parts. It was very hard and exhausting to search for like half an hour to find a MOSFET that’s available on Mouser but can’t find it on EasyEDA, so look in other libraries… To sum up it’s really time-consuming.
Fortunately at the end I had the parts and started actually making the schematic
I forgot to post devlog after my previous session, so yesterday I was searching for how to build a custom DIY ESC for my BLDC (brushless dc just to write it once) motor.
That needs about 50-70A at peak and I will power it with my 4S LiPo I already have. I did find pretty cutting-edge ICs. The problem was that I didn’t know how I’ll be able to control this with my ESP32 or if I have to get an Arduino.
After about an hour of research I found SimpleFOC a library for Arduino/ESP32 that does exactly that.
Today I continued it with looking at the supported hardware section and found an older but still good enough I hope IC, DRV8305 from TI (Texas Instruments). Unfortunately it has 48 pins so it’ll take a while to make a schematic from it… It’s just so complex I don’t even understand some pins function or why I need them….
In addition I also continued to search for an appropriate BLDC that not too big to draw my battery fully in 3 mins, however still strong enough to make my car go with about 30-50km/h, that’s what I imagined that’d be good to reach.
Also saw videos on youtube that high kv vs low kv BLDC motors it turned out that doesn’t really matter so I will pair with my relatively high nominal voltage battery with a lower kv motor that doesn’t have that huge current need. Still hesitating whether I need sensored motor or sensorless.
That’s all I think. I’ll definitely continue in the upcoming days
Started designing the main frame, it’s roughly complete, but I want to polish it like rounding corners, and making it symmetric. Unfortunately I lost like 30 mins when I started making the frame, cause I stopped the record and forgot to resume it. That’s the skip at 18s on Lapse. Also wanted to check in 3D whether there’s enough space for the front tyres to rotate. Don’t know whether it’s robust enough, to endure the forces and don’t get broken. Also attached the image of a BMW E30 that I will try to build as a 1/10 scale rc car. The scale is not good yet in the sketch I just wanted to get the ratios.
