Dusting Off an Old Project

Like, this was a literal dusting off. I’ve shelved this project for a while now, and tried to get back into it over my holiday break.

I’m sad to say that I lost a not insignificant amount of time, just trying to remember all my tooling setup. I was using VSCode as my main editor, and had things working… but ran into trouble getting data to print out via Serial.print.

Lo and behold, things were working… but for whatever reason, I’d only see data after I stopped the Serial Monitor. For some reason, VSCode couldn’t quite keep up… and a lot of trial an error led me to finally see data once I set a bit of a delay into my loop.

But! That delay ended up interfering with data populating TinyGps++ properly – something else that took a long while to figure out.

To make matters worse, I spent a lot of time trying to troubleshoot code, only to realize that the pins weren’t getting a good enough connection on my GPS module. Kind of like trying to figure out why my blender isn’t working, only to discover that it wasn’t fully plugged into the wall outlet enough. Super dumb, super frustrating.

All that said, after a lot of work just getting the basics settled… I’m in a better place again. Or at least, back to where I was, a long while ago.

It’s been some time since I’ve actually had a side/personal project, so it feels nice to have this. I’m looking to try to take things to the next step, beyond a breadboard… so I’m taking the plunge a bit on some soldering tools.

Funny thing – I was explaining to Liz my frustration with all the setup. It’s like having a pencil, but then finding out it doesn’t work. It should work, because it’s a pencil! But for some reason it doesn’t.

And then it works, but only in one room (but not another). Why? I could see updated data via the Serial Monitor when running the Arduino IDE, but couldn’t see any data via the Serial Monitor when running VSCode. Gah.

But I digress. Things are working again, and I’m slowly figuring out my next steps. It’s going to be an interesting next step, to try to get things a bit more permanent.

Related:
Connecting All the Things
Arduino + VS Code
Reaching out to the Satellites

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