• Success!

    Ben Harvey • 09/14/2020 at 10:30 • 0 comments

    After much soldering and testing and retesting, the device works! Now to get it showing smiley faces, random quotes etc. I plan to put a LiPo battery into a nice hardwood base to finish it off properly.

  • CHECK YOUR PINOUTS

    Ben Harvey • 08/23/2020 at 11:56 • 0 comments

    I had some time today to troubleshoot the project. Why no i2c devices showing up on the scanner? I thought there myst be bad connections, so I trimmed off the brass parts of each component and kept checking. I though that I'd try the OLED on it's own. Not working. Hmmm. Let me just double check what pins SDA/SCK are on on the Micro. Pin 2 is SDA, check the route of that connection. I have connected it to SCK. What an idiot. So I destroyed my sculpture to find out that I could have just desoldered and reconnected the pins on the arduino. Sigh. Well, at least I can try again with straighter rods.

  • More brass soldering and why breadboarding is important

    Ben Harvey • 08/11/2020 at 21:00 • 0 comments

    I finished soldering up the brass wires, and everything seems to be connected properly. I am happy with it. It was fiddly and difficult with the tools I had so don't want to undo it.


    I plug it in and my computer doesn't screen about overcurrent on the USB port so it's ok to now. I uploaded blink and that worked fine. I upload the OLED sketch, nothing happens, so I upload the i2c scanner sketch to find out if they are connected properly and I don't see any in the serial log. I have no idea what I have done wrong but chances are I have not connected somethig correctly.

    This is why breadboarding is important! So now I will desolder things and try again...

  • Start

    Ben Harvey • 08/08/2020 at 22:52 • 0 comments

    I decided to start putting together the main components of the station today. I have been waiting on a new soldering iron as the tip on mine is broken and while it works, it ain't pretty.

    When I lined up the components, most of the holes for the SCL/SDA Ground and Vcc connections were in the same place. Only the Ground and Vcc on the OLED were swapped around. I bent some brass rods around to cope with this and soldered it together.

    Next I'll work out how to connect the Arduino.