This week I split my time between the ROV and the golf cart, and both of them finally decided to cooperate… mostly. On the ROV side, one of the ESCs decided to let the magic smoke out. I soldered in a new one (no picture sadly) and that brought the motor back to life. On Thursday, Tim helped me get all the motors spinning in the correct directions, which was a big win.

This week was our first full week of school, and I wanted to take advantage of that, however I was out sick on Thursday which didn’t help. Nonetheless, I made a big discovery as to why I was having such a difficult time controlling the golf cart’s throttle via serial. I talked to Roman Rice, the creator of the driver board, and we determined that the issue I was experiencing was not a software issue.

This week in shop, I was very productive. I spent time working on both the ROV and the golf cart, which both had a lot done to them, especially on Thursday which is our new afterschool club day. In terms of the golf cart, the control system has been revamped… Instead of using a Metro Mini microcontroller, we are using an ESP32 which is capable of better hardware control. This means we can more accurately read the rotary encoder (with dedicated interrupt pins) and the PPM signal for the radio receiver simultaneously without interference.