Schematic

wanting to do the smart thing everyone else was doing and build out all the pins, I designed a very large board in order to include all possible data pins, and include a way to attach a battery, an SD card, like the board of all boards it was gonna be awesome. Even accessible with just a usb port so that I could take it with me to Ohio. One downer was that, for my project (see last week) I really wanted a small board that could fit into a tangerine-sized ball. But, for now, this would work.

The schematics took many hours, due to the amount of paths to build out.

The milling wen poorly, first mis calculating the size leading to a required redo (after 40 minutes, long duration due to the amount of paths). I also realized after another failed attempt that the last remaining 1/64 was too worn and made a super messy board, even ripping out paths.

Finding a drill bit that someone said they had used successfully, I tried it out on a test piece and it looked good enough. Therefore, I went for it! FINALLY around 3 AM it was done/as good as it was going to get. Unfortunately, some paths still didn't make it.

Soldering was a mess. The ESP32 board is HARD. IDK how people zoomed through that. Even worse, I soon lost hope of a successful board when completely failing at connecting the usb port. There were times when it seemed the solder had mixed with something else so that the soldering iron no longer melted it.

Finally, at 6 am Tuesday morning, I realized we no longer had the USB-UART converter things that my board required. I threw in the towel, cried (let's be honest) and drove home before my 9 am class.

Somehow managed not to crash driving 4 pm (after class) to 5 am to ohio the next evening/morning so there is the silver lining. I did vomit from exhaustion though lol