SWITCHES

click click

I have switches on the board now. They are gargantuan compared to the other components despite being only 6mm by 5 mm. These were awful to route (writing this in retrospect.)

Back to the schematic

I echanged the two drivers for two voltage regs, different model this time. supposed to be more efficient for what I want to do. I also learned what blind and burried vias were, too bad I cant use them. I took a while to find the new kind of regulator and relatively small caps.

Actually putting it all together

Ok, four was a bit too much, here's my attempt at it below. I think it is much much much more reasonable to go with two drivers and stack two boards for the full 4 motor control.

Putting it all together

This is what you call integration he** part one (second is when you put everything on-board)
This was still never not a pain, but now its done. I think i got everything but you never know.

Building it out

Voltage regulators!
There needs to be a large 2+2A@ 12v power management system for this, which hopefully will never actually be used in complete effect. Here's the schematic.. Again, many more caps and resisotrs and now inductors.Datasheets hurt my eyes now.

BME and BNO

I added those sensors I was yapping about eariler. Here they are in kicad! They are wired up by now, trust! This was a pin to figure out what the env pins were and addressing. Pullups on the i2c!

DRV8434 something something something driver

Data sheets data shets and more datasheets to go. I added this to my schematic, and now i need 3 more. should be fun. There are a lot of caps and at this point, I still don't know the footprint sizing of them (or what ic packagings!)

Analog

I added some DACs here to control the vref pin on the DRV stepper drivers. This controls the amperage going to the motors. Apparently, finding these specific parts gets rally hard when you're trying to minimize cost. I proboably over-complicated this but whatever. Ultra librarian is your friend btw.

Created the Project & Getting Started

This is almost all in retrospect.

Here, I created a list of features. I wanted:
4x stepper controllers
ESP32-S4
Many pins for ease of expansion
built-in sensor array (Got cut down to BNO and BME sensors -_- )
voltage regulation up. the. wazoo.