Recently I’ve been struggling with the feeling that nothing I have worked on in my professional career really matters and that the only way I can change that is to find some really interesting team to work with or make my own stuff so I’ve decided to take a second venture into embedded development on micro controllers. The core idea behind this is that eventually I can build cool and interesting small electronics instead of working on whatever bullshit VC backed crapware happens across my inbox. I learned about the ESP32 and similar micro controllers a few years ago and spent some time playing around with them in my free time but it never turned into a big hobby because I was busy building masterfully crafted software for some dumpster fire company and put my hobbies aside for them but I always wanted to explore more and potentially turn it into a business so when the opportunity presented itself again I hopped on to Youtube to brush up on some information and see what things had changed in the world of micro controllers. After watching a whole lot of DroneBot Workshop, Andreas Spiess and GreatScott! I was relieved to see that things hadn’t changed a whole lot so I planned out a couple of projects, one simple and one complex, to work towards and hopped on AliExpress.
Bluetooth Speaker
The first project is quite simple on the surface, a bluetooth speaker that plays music from my phone.. but I wanted to spice it up a bit and be proud of what came out of it so I decided that it had to meet some specific requirements in order to be considered complete.
- Capable of “lossless” audio (or as close to it as Bluetooth can get..)
- High quality audio (correct box, speaker, amp, etc.)
- Long battery life
- Built from scratch with raw components
- Uses custom PCB(s?) that I design
The first two requirements are pretty self explanatory but speaker box design is actually super tough and takes a lot of effort to get right. Now, I’m many things but I am no wood worker, so I told a good friend that is a wood worker about the project and he agreed to work on it with me. I did some research into components and found e-Ink displays which I really liked and it fit the bill for power consumption so I ordered some of them as well.
The first goal though, would prove to be a little more complex than I had imagined in the beginning.. Reading up on audio codecs for Bluetooth to brush up on my long outdated knowledge I realized that AptX was still the way to go for high quality audio and that there’s now multiple versions of AptX including AptX, AptX-HD and AptX-LL so I set my sights on supporting whatever version of AptX I could and made some early purchases buying a couple of ESP32’s off AliExpress - 2 ESP32-C6. Turns out, after much research and many attempts, using the C6 would not work for my project because it does not support Bluetooth Classic, only Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) so I purchased an old school ESP32-WROOM dev kit instead, waited for that to come in only to find out that I also need PSRAM in order to use AptX and that only the ESP32-WROVER dev kits include PSRAM. It turns out these have become somewhat difficult to find on AliExpress but luckily I was able to order some and that’s how far I have gotten with this project so far.
My next steps in this project are to tidy up the UI, design and implement a power system using batteries that fits goal 3 and then learn how to design PCB’s so I can send my design off to PCBWay to be turned into a fully custom PCB just for this project, hitting goals 4 and 5 with no SCRUM meetings, incompetent managers or moronic buzzwords designed to attract soon to be broke VC firms.
RC Car
Building my own vehicle is something I’ve always wanted to do as someone with a strong interest in vehicles, mechanics, etc. and I had a master plan to develop a large go-kart style vehicle at some point in the future but after some thinking I decided that it would make more sense to start at a smaller scale in order to reduce R&D costs and the potential safety hazard that would come with building a large vehicle that can carry a human. This turned out to also be a great project to do with my son who has an interest in RC and somewhat of an interest in electronics. While this project is considerably more difficult than the first one it’s also a great excuse to play around with some ideas for software that I have been toying with in my mind for many years such as an intelligent all wheel drive system, software differential and more that I can’t talk about yet ;) This project also had some requirements so that it would be an interesting and fun project that would provide a good learning experience for my son and I as we designed, prototyped and built this thing from scratch so I enlisted my son to help me come up with some requirements.
- Capable of off road driving
- Long range remote control
- Camera on board for an optional FPV style view
- Lots of power..
- Long battery life
- Must be able to tow a trailer
Most of these were set by my son but I enjoy his line of thinking and so we began mocking up some components on a breadboard. So far we’ve been able to use an ESP32-WROOM with a TB6612FNG to drive two motors, some LED lights and a buzzer but we’re working hard in the background at putting together the rest of the things we need in order to achieve our goals.
As we went through the initial design process there was one big lingering question - how are we going to build the car? We can build the component breadboard but we were lacking the ability to create the physical parts for the car that we were inevitably going to need. Obviously, the answer here is to use an existing RC car or kit system and build upon that but that wasn’t good enough because like the bluetooth speaker project I wanted this to be built from scratch and so the only answer was a 3D printer. I spent many, many days reading and watching videos about 3D printers until I found the Sovol SV08 which is open source and inspired by an open source project - as a software developer I love open source and after finding out that even the CAD files for the printer were available free of charge on their Github repo I ordered one, set it up and promptly ran out of filament.
The Future
As of now I’m enjoying the work on these two projects but it’s spurred something in me that wants to make cool shit and so I want to continue building and developing these electronics projects growing my skillset from programming into electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and more. Eventually I’d like to open an online shop to sell this stuff so that I can make this my primary gig and finally escape the buzzword happy circlejerk that is the software industry. I think most of us that got into programming on our own always just wanted to make cool shit and our dreams were quickly demolished by the downward spiral that is the software industry so if you’re finding yourself in this situation I would encourage you to explore something new and go back to your roots, for our collective sanity.