I have to confess – the first time I pressed the switch and saw this working, I started giggling uncontrollably. This is all fairly rudimentary electronics wiring, but I continue to feel lucky every time things just work – and also lucky that my components aren’t exploding in a small burst of flame and smoke.
I have to say – seeing the lights come up was a delightful experience. It was exciting to see things working, and also exciting to not see my Arduino go up in a puff of smoke due to misconfiguration or faulty wiring.
In trying to imagine moving my project into a physical container (box), the Arduino Uno itself is a bit bulky. I’ve been trying to figure out how to shrink the footprint down more, and ultimately decided to switch things over to an Arduino Nano (technically a Nano Every).
I haven’t affixed the lid yet to the top of the box, and wanted to see how things fared in the spaces I made. So I decided to hook up the display and buttons.
As part of my Arduino project, I plan on enclosing it within a box. I’m somewhat at a stage now where I actually need the box, so I was working on that a bit tonight. Got a few basic pieces of wood from Home Depot to experiment with.
I’m torn on this step, because right now I feel like I’m procrastinating. I think it’ll be good to actually document my setup… and I think it’ll also help to share my design with others, because I’m positive I’m doing tons of things wrong. Or at a minimum, I have lots of opportunities for refinement.
What I should be doing now is transferring things to a Perma-Proto board, and to start figuring out how to enclose all this stuff into an actual, honest to goodness box.
This whole setup needs to be smaller (small enough to fit in a jewelry box), so there’s definitely more refactoring in my future.
But that’s like me wanting to improve my kitchen production line, when I’m just happy that I baked a cake that tastes very cake-like, and doesn’t kill anyone. Improvements to come, but they’re coming later.
Before running some errands tonight, I decided to throw my Arduino project into a box, hook up a 9V battery to it, and take it along for a test drive. On our drive.
Relocated wires, and tried to “clean up” a bit. This isn’t code, but definitely feels like refactoring. Might even be able to get away with a half-size breadboard.
This was incredibly daunting, as there were 16 pins in total. And though they’re spaced out just like everything else I’ve soldered… these seemed closer together. A trick of the mind, but I was sweating something awful as I stepped through each pin.
I’m not gonna lie: I’ve been sweating this part of the project. I’ve never soldered anything before, and the prospect of burning electronics (or myself) with a length of hot metal has made me… apprehensive, to say the least.
This has been an interesting project. Super slow, high learning curve. But I’d like to think that once I figure out how things should all work, I can create several/multiple versions with ease.
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.
I got a larger breadboard to work with, and was able to place my components together in what seemed like a coherent setup. The LCD wiriing was always a little crazytown, but add to that four more jumper wires for the GPS module… and this thing looks like a miniature bomb.
The way Arduino code works, there are two main functions: setup() and loop(). Setup is run once at the start, and loop is run continuously… well, forever. Add this to the fact that I really don’t know C++ at all, and it makes for some gnarly code. At least for now, in my first passes.