Pretty kewl site amirite!

https://lex-icl.github.io/BagLiveChat/

I spent 6 hours on this oh my goshdhshs, it turned out rly pretty I think!

I remember learning to make websites during school and having so much fun with it, this is the same feeling, I dun spent my whole afternoon bruehrh

Erhm, the last section will be complete once this entire project will be complete, so yea!

I added JS for the nichijou ost music and sum buttons to make it a bit more responsive!

[p.s: I didn’t do those 1-click website makers, I made this with muh SOUL mane! I used ai to debug, for syntax and autocomplete, but this entire website is MY soul! I’m pretty sure you can tell that it’s made by human (me) becuz u can feel the joy I had while making]

verity approved

it’s ye…

I finally stopped procrastinating on this

I spent like a couple hours trying to wrap my head around the architecture of how I’ll make the ESP32 connect with the website, and how I’ll do the image processing in the website backend to turn uploadable .png/.jpg files into rgb565, and how the esp will get info from the website, so I went on a whole rabbit hole reading MDN articles about HTTP, and realized I should probably setup the website first, so I linked the website mission here!

I’ll finish the mission tomorrow, then figure out how to make the esp32 grab a rgb565 .bin image file and flash it onto the screen.
Also, I replaced the big lcd with a smaller one because the 4 row one was really buggy!

See ya tomorrow (p.s: 21 day sticky streak for plushie…)

why it le break

Okauy after soldering the lcd to a little module to turn it i2c compatible, uhh it writes data, it’s just, a mess…

I mean…

It writes, and stuff, so that’s good!
I’ve tried changing wires, cleaning the flux off of the soldered pins, reuploading the firmware, uhh more stufff

Thing is, may or may not have messed up the lcd, will try my confirmed not-brainded lcd tomorrow

solderirnigngn

oka…

the esp straight to the screen was kind of an annoying setup, transferred it to the breadboard

I’m gonna add a text option on the website to submit a message so I’m putting an lcd display to do it, am gonna solder the lil module to make it i2c! (im making another log after this, this one is for da streak)

FINALLYYYY

Okaey it didn’t even take that long, total hours is only 4 hours, which means this weekend I’ll make immaculate progress!

Apparently…

There was some user setup issue, I should’ve known I shouldn’t have just blindly followed some wiring I got to the user setup, uncommented my specific TFT screen, then set up the wiring, and violà!

The yuuko has been displayed….

Now I’m gonna set up a scrolling LCD screen for text and connect it to the same esp32, and after figuring out the scrolling I’ll get to work on the website to uplaod images and text… I’m expecting a challenge learning how to convert sent user images to fit the screen ratio and converting it to hexademical data, but it’ll be fun!

See ya tomorrow!

AGH.

Only 30~ minutes today cuz am sleepy and have classes, but streak going! Anyway…

Soooo…

I just made sure my esp wasn’t broken and could actually be written and run code, so I did the classic ‘hello world’ of electronics and made sure it was at least ALIVE…

So now I’m trying to just BARE MINIMUM flash an image onto the TFT … BUT!

THERES SUM

Specific driver IC because all TFTs aren’t the same so I need to figure out what my driver IC is and look it up for a specific library that fits it so it can abstract away all the lower level stuff! I have a lil low power microscope in my house I can use to zoom into this and figure out what IC it is, so I can figure out the compatibility issues (probably why it wasn’t working before!)

This specific video doesn’t use image data though, so I’m gonna need to figure out to create an amalgamation of code to make it print out image data without needing an SD card (because, this thing’s supposed to be online and uploadable yaknow!)

Almost the weekend! So, will make some amazing progress across the weekend! :D

TFTS are EVIIL…

I’ve been trying to just get a baseline image printed onto this TFT, but there was some weird conflict with the ESP32 so I decided to switch to my old reliable ESP32 and realized the one I was using only had 30 pins and my old one has 38 pins??! Whuat…

Thing is…

For this TFT to show images, I need some converter to convert an image into an array of hex to save in the esp memory to display on the screen, there’s a cool online site for it, but when I make this get images from a website imma need to make it auto convert images into an array O_o but that’s a problem for another time!! >:D

Anddd:

Ok so the backlight turns on, but it’s just because I connected the vcc and LED, there’s ZERO image being displayed, maybe the wiring? The wiring from the video I tried to follow I don’t understand the rationale for so I’m gonna try to wire it myself and understand ‘whyyy’ to wire it like taht… I printed a pic of the tft pins cuz I can’t see them when connected lel. The code compiles already so syntactically okay… I need to learn how this TFT communicates to display images with my esp32 and which pins and try to get at least 1 solid color to display, then I can move onto pictures!

So uhm…

Bit of a headache, but a good headache! That means I have stuff to learn! Urgh…!

see ya tomm!

Urrgh
FINALLY STARTING ANOTHER PROJECT!!
I’m planning to

Get it working on a breadboard (i.e: make the website to upload photos live, make sure it works and displays on the screen actually)
Then make a PCB for it on KiCad, and then have it fabricated
Finally make a 3d printed enclosure for it with the buttons to reset, turn it on and off on the side

As of right now…
I’m just trying to get the screen to display something! I was planning on using an ESP32 C3, the tiny one that’s very mini, I already soldered the pins to it, then many hours of trying to troubleshoot it brought me to the fact that, yes, the board itself was freakcing defectiveevevas (online shopping is jsut gambling atp)

I’m using platformIO as my development environment, so it was kind of cool not needing to download a bunch of libraries into the arduino IDE, and setting up a benchmark blink led test onto the ESP…

Thing is…
Yaknow, linking Lookout for hardware projects is kinda odd because you kinda just have to trust that the seemingly afk time in the lookout is actually me building the physical thing IRL 😭 I hope these pictures are proof enough…

And like…
I was following some youtube tutorial of someone flashing an image onto the esp, but he was using BARE HEXADECIMAL data to individually light up pixels bruh, I had to spend a while looking up an LCD image translator, and looking up something that worked on mac, and I don’t think I’ll use this method in the future 😭 I’m going to look up a bunch more on how the TFT works because it’s not as abstracted and beginner friendly as I thought, or maybe I’m just stupid tryna follow someone translating bare hex code or smth 😭

In the end, the code stopped giving errors, I translated an image into hex, plopped in the data, andddddd-

NOTHING
I mean- not nothing, just, a white screen… Urgh, I need to learn more on how this thing actually works instead of blindly following wiring and code!
Yeah taht’s it… See ya tomorrow! (probably)