Personally this week has been quite a lot: first the code was tested with the weight sensors, which required a lot of soldering, all of which has been completed with some re-soldering required during the final setup tomorrow/in the coming days before the final demo. Currently, all seven servos, the motion sensor, LED indicator, and most of the strain gauges have been implemented along with some starter code to connect with the software once the MQTT protocol to connect the two has been completed. My current work is to debug the issues once more than 2 servos have been implemented, which is that despite the multiple power sources, something is being connected improperly/ the servos are not functioning. I will be working on this remainder of the weekend to figure this out before the presentation.
Progress is right on track, though the debugging is worrisome as it was expected after 2 servos are working, 7 should work just as well. However, time will be dedicated to solving this issue as well as recruiting my other teammates as soon as possible should I not be able to find the issue by tonight.
I hope to complete the implementation of all 7 servos as well as integrating fully with the mechanical by tomorrow. With the software, it might need more debugging but hopefully that is completed by the final presentation. Worst case, it will be done before the final demo.
I had to learn more about the Arduino IDE and ESP32 Nano configuration- I have used Arduinos in the past but this is my first experience with the Nano as well as the GPIO pin configuration system, which was a learning curve. I looked at online forums with certain bugs (such as why a servo didn’t work with a digital pin- this turned out to be a GPIO pin number issue) as well as consulted AI tools such as Claude and ChatGPT for faster as well as more efficient answers, both of whom that I wasn’t too familiar with outside of simple conceptual questions prior to this semester. It was another learning curve to ask prompts that gave me the answer that I was looking for: for example, I was confused by my nano kept showing a red light and at first the AI believed I was talking about a different power indicator. After narrowing down my wordy explanations, it finally gave me the true issue: something was being grounded that 
wasn’t supposed to be.