So today we finally had a chance to work on the first control board, the radio and I/O shield for the Carambola2.

I only learned how to solder SMD components myself 6 months ago, so this was a good chance to teach Mr.14 as well :-)

Everything lined up perfectly! The only bug, as it turned out, was that I had the i2c SDA and SCL lines swapped on the PCB, aargh!

The solution is easy thankfully, as i2c on the Carambola2 is simply the Linux i2c over GPIO driver, so all I had to do to fix it was swap the GPIO on the module load command.

The purple OSHPark PCB does look pretty good!

Next step is to hook up the radio. I have been making progress with the software; we are now going to use MQTT-SN as the protocol, with a bit of luck we might be sending messages by the end of the long weekend.

Once we manage to get some reliable comms going then we can come back and populate some of the general I/O on the shield.