So I have been quiet of late, and I thought it was about time I explain myself.

Distractions

To start with, I have this little cheeky girl growing her first few teeth:

Which has been a bit more stressful than normal, with less sleep and less time to work on things.

Setbacks

Along the way I also had my soldering iron break on me, which took a while to fix, and when I finally got it working again, I broke the SD card slot on my Raspberry Pi!

Not once, but twice!

First the side highlighted at the bottom, this wasn't too bad, it kept working if held at the right angle, but once the second part at the top went I could only boot the Pi by holding the card in place.

I have spent a lot of time trying to glue the microSD card adaptor down, and other quick hacks that just didn't do the job.

So I am going to tear apart an old SD card reader and see if I can do a transplant...

Progress

However it isn't all bad news, before breaking things I made some headway on some prototype boards, finally getting away from the breadboards:

At the top is a bit of a Pi plate for the Raspberry Pi (aka The Hub), bottom left is a CP2102 USB to serial adaptor with an FTDI socket layout and bottom right is the start of a node.

No sensors yet as I broke the Pi not long after completing the Pi plate, I was actually removing said plate and unknowingly using the SD card for leverage...