The PCB for the ‘Thing’  arrived today, so I spent the better part of the day soldering it. That went well, except I scraped some of the covering off from some of the copper traces when I tried to cut the leads of the OLED screen to make them shorter to fit the raspberry pi on. Fortunately, JLC sent a free roll of electrical tape, so I used that to cover the traces.

Here’s hoping that will solve it.

I spend the rest of the day trying to get the OLED display to work. Finally, I installed Adafruit’s Circuit Python SSD1306 library, and it worked fine. 

Next, I’ll develop a basic operating system (a menu-based system to interact with the OLED using the buttons), that allows you to run programs. To program it, I’ll use a Jupyter script running as a web server from the pi, which will probably act as the main way to program.

That may take about 5 - 9 days, depending on what extra tasks need to be done, so I’ll do a log when it is finished.