Though Anthony previously mentioned this week as a good week to look into RF (radio frequency) transmit/receive stuff, when Neil mentioned making an access point with an ESP32 in lecture, I got excited at the prospect. I don't know why, but I thought it would be funny if an access point could read at least in part the packets sent across it, then perhaps print on serial whether or not a user was going to a specific site (I just thought it would be funny to get a little notification like "Uh oh, Little Timmy's reading Wikipedia again!"). Like every week, I didn't get to these ideal ideas, but partially got something. Unfortunately, though, this week I never finished debugging.
In general it was a busy week for me, but I luckily managed to mill and solder a board. ESP32s are really hard to solder though! Rather than prominent pins that jut out, it has little pads underneath it and continuing indentations visible from the top. It also has a lot of pins. The first time around, I got away with only soldering the pins that were connected to traces and other components, but when I tried to program the board, it didn't work.
I made sure to follow the same process of programming as Neil's video showed and even tried the switch both ways, but nothing here worked, so I concluded it was my hardware at fault. I also noticed while trying to debug this that the first and second pins were shorted together. Assuming that was the problem, I tried to remove the ESP... and that was a bad idea. With many pins already soldered to the pin, even my caution in trying to slowly remove the microcontroller by repeated heating an entire side of the pad and trying to jiggle the chip free didn't stop me from ripping off a bunch of pads on the board.
I made sure the first and second pins were no longer shorted, but then realized what was probably the REAL reason my board couldn't be programmed (I mean, I wasn't even using the first pin, only the second): one of the traces leading to one of the serial pin headers was milled too thin and had broken. So, precariously with wires, I re-soldered the microcontroller to the board and made sure all connections were correct and not shorted.
Now my board looks very ugly, but at least I now have a shot of trying to get it to work.