jeremy.geppertSo... today was a roller coaster. The boards arrived and look GREAT!!!!! SO EXCITED!!!!
Then I installed the OLED... But first, remember how I was so proud of printing the template 1:1 out to make sure the window alignment was good? Yeah, I nailed that. BUTTTT... Big smelly BUTT TRUMPET!
I FAILED TO NOTICE THE OLED BOARD EXTENDING TOO FAR! I didn't cut out the whole board template, just the window of concern. The rest of the paper covered this HUGE oversight. This is a great example of being to focused on one thing and missing other stuff. Seriously, I KNOW BETTER. This is how we get humbled.
And... I just read the nice article on HackADay.com that Kristina wrote giving my project some love and pointing out the paper template trick. SO.... this a bit embarrassing but I'll own this and maybe this will help others avoid a rookie mistake. Slow down. Phone a friend to look over your shoulder and give you a sanity check.
Back to good news, I soldered on the components, blacked out the screen frame with a sharpie for now and it works! The signal displayed is for a different sized screen, but I just wanted to see it get power and data. Good enough test for now.
I have 30 of these sitting here now that represent both success and failure. There is probably some life lesson there but I'm not slowing down to figure it out right now. They are functional. I am leaning towards making a revision and deviating from the scale slightly to hide the OLED board by moving the screen hole and pins left. I think the white keyboard is far more visible than black will be. I am going to likely stick with a white silk screen and Cricut or laser some vinyl sticker for the black bar.
I do want to include a speaker... but my other SAO (SAO LoRa Walkie Talkie) is almost done and I really want to get that done as well in time for a proof and potential revisions. I have the parts laying here so at a minimum I should have a cobbled together speaker version. And yes, there is a library for the speak & spell voice!!!! THAT IS A MUST.
The badges need some comms and my brother and I are planning some cool tricks combining his SAOs with the RF capability of my other SAO idea.
Back to struggle bus where the struggle is real but we don't give up!
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Ahh, welcome to the club I guess, my first Han Solo board run looked so amazing and then I realised that I had the pinout of the LEDs wrong and they didn't work.
The blog post made me watch some youtube videos about the speak & spell, something I only knew from E.T. and I was very much afraid of E.T. back then (probably even now). Stumbled over the Arduino library as well and wondered if I should ask and add some pressure, but here you are :D
I would probably just tape all of them down with painterstape and hit it with some spray paint, then solder it. I'd imagine the paint would burn off quickly when soldering on the displays. The keyboard does look nice!
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Spray paint is a great idea! I'll try that.
There was a German version of the Speak & Spell.
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That is gonna look great either way you deal with that OLED board. Good reminder on template, because I just did one after measuring my OLED boards, and still got it wrong too. Reprinting now... Also going to 3D print my board quickly for another level of sanity check. For your OLED, consider rotating the OLED board 180 so the header pins are on the right edge of the design. You'll still need to shift your overall window left, but not as much (maybe it doesn't matter?) It also opens the door to removing the thru-holes, and soldering them to SMD pads like [Aaron] did: https://hackaday.io/project/196403-macintosh-sao (but you absolutely cannot put any leverage on that screen or you risk tearing the pads off. Maybe add some other SMD pads so you can add solid wire over the back of the OLED to "staple" it to the back of the main SAO board too?
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This is a good idea.... I'll see what I have for room.
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