DEVLOG 001 - Planning out & Testing
So basically I had this idea of building a little desktop robot that could show a face, clock, weather, and calendar and I just wanted something that felt alive on my desk, not another boring info display. Decided to go with the ESP32 and the ST7735 TFT display, ordered the parts and waited.
Parts came in and before doing anything permanent I threw everything onto a breadboard first just to test connections and make sure the components were actually talking to each other. Got the ESP32 seated, wired up the TFT with the SPI lines, and powered it on and immediately the display was just… white. Solid white, nothing rendering at all. I genuinely thought it was a code issue so I started digging through everything:

Rewrote the initialization logic multiple times
Swapped library settings, tried different pin configs
Spent way too long convinced it was something in the code

Eventually I just rewired the whole breadboard from scratch out of frustration and it just worked. Wiring issue the whole time, one of the connections on the breadboard just wasn’t seated properly into the rail. Such a simple thing but it ate up so much time.
After that everything started clicking. Got the display confirmed working, flashed the RoboEyes library on it and saw the eyes blink on actual hardware for the first time that was a real moment honestly. Super small but it just felt like okay this is actually going somewhere. First boot was literally just a face sitting there blinking on a breadboard with loose wires everywhere, nothing else running, but that was enough to know the foundation was solid. Ended the session jumping into CAD and just roughing out what the enclosure could look like, trying to figure out how everything fits together in a way that actually looks good sitting on a desk.