Mechatronics Engineer | Software Builder Building robots from scratch 🇳🇬 Sharing the process, the lessons, and everything in between.
Abuja, Nigeria
Joined November 2024
- Tweets672
- Following99
- Followers92
- Likes1K
Pinned Tweet
1/
I killed a microcontroller trying to save it.
Let me tell you how my first robot build went from
"everything tested fine" to me ordering two new
boards.
(thread)
ALT A photo of the dead S2 mini.
I ordered the exact ESP32 board this time.
Two of them, just in case.
I'm early in robotics, and I've accepted that I'll probably break a few more things before I get good at this. Better to have a spare sitting on my table than to wait weeks for another delivery.
ALT Two ESP32 blocks
1
6
180
The result of information abundance but decline in understanding
Fourteen hours after your comment and no one has provided an answer that they could defend in a 5 minute talk. They go on about weights a lot without telling us exactly what a weight is, like they're just parroting info they searched for and didn't understand.
4
69
Muftau Jimoh retweeted
Can I ask a dumb question:
If I can download an AI model and run it without internet, where is everything it knows actually stored?
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This exact question was posted verbatim hours earlier by @Tech_girl.
x.com/Tech_girl/stat…
Before this build, I thought solder was just there to make the connection.
Melt it, connect it, done. Easy to undo, right?
Then I tried to take my microcontroller off the PCB. I added heat and the top of the solder melted off, but there were still a few layers left inside that just wouldn't flow out.
So I pulled. It did not move. I pulled harder.
The reset button gave up before the solder did.
Respect to solder.
10/
What I'd do differently:
Get a desoldering pump and wick before you need them.
On your first build, match the tutorial's hardware exactly.
Don't pull. Heat, then lift.
ALT The terminal photo from slide 2 (the diagnosis)
1
2
95
8/
After that I tried everything I could find.
Tested the cable with my phone. Checked the EN
pin. Even bridged EN to 3.3V with a small wire, in
case the pull-up resistor went with the button.
Nothing. The board was gone.
1
1
78
4/
Then I plugged it into my laptop and... nothing.
Not detected. No light on the board. I was like, why?
Checked again. Still nothing.
1
1
75
6/
And the reset button came off.
It's not critical for programming the board, so I
thought, fine, I can work around it. But I still needed the board off that PCB.
1
1
54
5/
So I decided to take the board off the PCB and test it on its own.
In my head I was like, come on, it's just solder, how
hard can it be?
Omo. Solder holds things properly. I pulled way
harder than I should have.
1
1
57
3/
The soldering was going smoothly, to be honest.
Header pins, PCB, microcontroller, all connected.
I took my multimeter and tested every connection
for continuity. Everything checked out.
1
1
73
2/
The robot is Sesame, an open-source walking
robot. Four legs, eight servos, and a small
microcontroller as the brain.
I was building with a Lolin S2 Mini, while the
tutorial I followed used a different ESP32 board.
ALT The half-built Sesame photo.
1
6
215
Got two quotes to 3D print the same parts for my robot.
One was ₦145k, the other was ₦28k.
I went with the ₦28k one, but honestly, I still don't know what that extra ₦117k would have bought me.
So abeg, if you print parts often, what's actually worth paying more for?
The material? The finish? The printer itself?
1
11
108