Soon after we built the first prototype, we realized that we had big changes to make.

Nothing worked as expected. our motor drivers were blowing up, 3D printed gears were unstable and noisy, the robot was getting too heavy.

We designed a better holder for motors with gearboxes, which looked promising.

As we were adding everything together, the robot became quite bulky and heavy. The makeshift tires made from bike inner tube didn't have enough grip, the motor drivers were weak... and we didnt even start tackling the biggest challange, that is programming the FPGA.

We realized that to meet the project deadline, the FPGA has to go.

So, we started working on a v2 redesign, with an ESP32-S2 controlling the whole operation. The v2 design should be much more integrated, ideally we want to have everything except the sensor on one PCB.