deʃhipuSo I was presenting my robots on this year's PyCon.us, and this little guy didn't survive the flight over the Big Pond. It looks like the ESP8266 board is fried. When I get home, I will rebuild it properly, on a printed circuit board and with some nice distance sensors, and, most importantly, a voltage regulator.
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Found out what was wrong. Turns out it's not power problems or magic blue smoke or anything like that. It's simply that I soldered the power switch directly to one of the traces on the module, and that got stripped at some point when some force was applied to the switch... Still seems like a dedicated PCB is a good idea, especially since I can then use those SMD time-of-flight distance sensors...
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Sad to hear! I really like your small robot! Will you use the ESP-12 boards this time? They come with the ADC broken out :)
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I will probably use ESP-12, but not for the ADC -- I discovered node.readvdd33() function (https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware/wiki/nodemcu_api_en#nodereadvdd33) which reads the power voltage, so that is perfect for monitoring the battery. I also want to use those time-of-flight distance sensors, so I will definitely need a PCB for it, which means that it will take several weeks anyways.
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so no regulator then?
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Well, if I'm making a PCB anyways, I may as well add a small linear regulator in there. I suppose the lack of a regulator is what killed the current robot.
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but the regulator will always give 3.3V so readvdd would give you a steady 3.3V too? Or am I missing something?
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That's true, oops :) So I will need the ADC after all. Thanks for pointing this out.
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