Redemption

Exciting progress today. PWM-enabled DC motor drivers arrived and assembled. Threw together some quick boilerplate code on the ESP32 to move both motors (left + right) forward at different rates. I was hoping to see the ball move in a circle, which it is able to do.

There's currently not enough space in the core motivator chassis to house all the components, so the wiring is just hanging there unprotected with the top half unattached. Because of this, I limited the speed of the motors in the software quite significantly, only running at 10% and 20% of full output. The ball should be able to make a much prettier arc with some fine-tuning of the motor speeds and feedback from the accelerometer, but I this feels like a huge step in itself.

June 13, 2024

https://wolles-elektronikkiste.de/en/using-freertos-with-esp32-and-arduino#tasks

Shoutout Wolfgang, we're now multitasking and using tasks with RTOS to read from the gyroscope

This is great, this is huge. RTOS tasks are implemented pretty differently in Arduino vs ESP-IDF, and I've been struggling to implement them successfully since this post from 11 months ago -> https://www.arbo.website/blog/chapter-6

Hot damn. Moving quick today. You are looking at 1) readings from the gyroscope and 2) the Balance PID algorithm responding to changes in the pitch reading with simulated motor output, both running as separate RTOS tasks.