Custom ESP32-S3 development board — professionally manufactured by JLCPCB. A far cry from where it all started. It Started in a School Science Lab — Around 1998 Most people who get into electronics start with a kit, a tutorial, maybe a breadboard and some LEDs. I started by sneaking ferric chloride out of a school science lab to etch my first PCB. That was around 1998. I was living in the Maldives — a small island nation in the Indian Ocean — where there was no electronics supply chain, no maker community, no local PCB fab. Just a chemistry cabinet at school, a copper-clad board from somewhere, and a lot of curiosity. This post is about what the next 25+ years of PCB prototyping looked like from there. The early wins with proper chemicals, the years of improvisation when those chemicals disappeared, the real injuries, the failed boards, and finally — the moment JLCPCB changed ever...
After the the part 1 of this episode i had some weird problems with the ATmega1284p. Sometimes i am able to upload the sketch via ISP and UART side also having some issues to upload sketches and use as an serial port. So i ask some assistance from the letmakerobots.com and explained whats going on with my 1284p.
Since i boot loaded it recently, i did not have any idea of what might be the cause. Finally bajdi from LMR replied me and after few conversations with him, he mentioned that he have used 1284p lots of time and this guy built robots, controlling lots of servo from it. So my boot-loading is perfect.
When i run single servo sweep sketch the jittering and wobbling starts and stops. So i planed to take the circuit out of bread board ( which have created problems and weird interference a lot for me) and build it on copper strip board which is in the image above.
With the proper smoothing capacitors and supply it worked. I manage to upload the sketches via UART side and controlling servo was perfect. no more unknown problems.
When the servo gets crazy
I advice people out there to use buck based voltage regulators not the crappy old 7805's. LM2596-5 is good one to make a 5v supply circuit and it monitors the output from feedback and simply saying it more like a DC to DC converter.
Special thanks to Bajdi (http://www.bajdi.com/)
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