‘Well, that’s annoying’

The cover photo is promising, it really is. The updated 3d print fits perfectly, the M5 nylon captive nuts do their job and a wheel is easily attached to the front.

I plug it in aaaaand ’device disconnect sound’. This can be a common problem for me, change one thing or even a lot of things that have no relation to the issue that has just popped up, even if the project was behaving the correct way the day before...

It's behaving the same way as if the bootloader was there like I discussed in the previous post, however every now and then it gets recognised. My gut tells me its a power issue and the arduino is rebooting midway through the SPI handshake to start talking to the wheelbase. The wheelbase supposedly drops from 5v to 3v which really is an issue when the arduino nano I using is a 5V board. Thinking I'm going to have to move to a 3v microcontroller or look at a DC to DC boost converter.

I wonder if I can use some of my spare ESP32-wroom modules from the pedal project instead. This will alleviate the power issue and remove the need for a logic converter inline. This will require a closer review of the code and possibly some porting and measuring to make sure the chip will fit in the hub. An ESP32 is massive overkill for this project though, especially when per chip price is upwards of $18 compared to an ATMega328 at $3 per chip. Hopefully I have a solution to waffle about in the next post.