Week of 3/9 - 3/13

This week, I was trying to use the 8-pin servo driver, but I think the creators purposely made it difficult to use because nothing I did worked. I started out by trying to find some kind of documentation on the pinouts, and I eventually found it, but it took a long time and was hidden in a random description. I also came across the issue that most of the time, it had info on the 16-pin board, which had the same name as the 8-pin one.

Eventually, I managed to find some information, though, so I connected the board in what I thought would work, but of course, it didn't, so I had to keep troubleshooting for quite some time. The issue wasn't that it was doing the wrong things, but rather it wasn't doing anything at all.

Eventually, I gave up on trying with the ESP32, and instead, I tried using a Metro Mini to see if the issue was because of the ESP rather than the board itself. I hooked everything back up, and it still didn't do anything at all, so I checked the PWM pins, and they didn't have any output at all, so I had to give up on these boards.

This led me to switch to the other board I had been using, the servo 2040. The only issue was that I had fried the board before when I tried to use all 18 motors, since the voltage was too high, and I hadn't separated the servo and logic power, which led to a critical component getting destroyed. We had the replacement part from a while back tho, so I tried to reattach that, but it didn't work.

I had tried to take off the old fried part with the heat gun, but it took off a pad with it, and completely destroyed the area around it too, so I was advised to just give it up and order a new board, since it would also be very difficult to attach such a small piece that also has 5 pins. Ordering a new board will probably be for the best, and hopefully, I can get back to coding the walking and finishing this project after that.