It's always the simple things

I feel a bit silly. In my last post I was going full send on a ESP32 or power managed solution to the power issue I suspected was causing my issues. Turns out, I just missed a wire...

This extra green one specifically. It joins the 3.3v lines from the logic converter to the 3.3v pin on the arduino board. It took the soldering iron longer to warm up than it took me to install this wire and test it on the rig. Without any weirdness, it started up with the wheelbase, was recognised correctly in both normal and CSW modes and booted up when pulled off the wheelbase and put back on. While this fixes and somewhat finishes my prototype it adds a bit of complexity to the next stage of this project.

That wire confrims the power issue and the 5v line drops below 2.7v during the handshake causing the arduino to reboot and the wheelbase to fall into some kind of failsafe. So for the next stage of this project, designing and producing a pcb, I'll have to add a regulated 5v circuit to the schematic. ATMega chips (the MCUs Arduino uses) are quite sensitive to voltages and drop frequency depending on the available voltage, 8mhz and 16mhz are the most popular frequencies they use. From what I've read about the fanatec wheelbase 8mhz isn't enough to keep everything happy.

As you can see from the title image for this post, I have the bones of the schematic completed. I just have to port over the pinout from the code to the schematic with a drawing file to get the fanatec connector pinout onto the pcb. I'll also be looking at adding the headers for the switches and such for the full size emulator hub to possibly add the pcb for that to be included in the same first batch of PCBs. I'm not equiped to populate and bake the style of componets I want to put on the PCBs myself so I'll have the batch populated by the PCB fab.