Log 3

Got the live preview working and made the mistake of thinking that meant I was done. Soldered the whole thing together. Screen, button, camera, all of it permanently.

Screen immediately stopped working. Just black and white, nothing else. And this one is fully on me because I had only really tested the camera properly on its own. I never tested the screen and the switch together with everything else wired up the way it would actually be in the final build. So the first time all of it existed at once was after it was already soldered.

Ended up resoldering it multiple times and it came back so it was just a bad joint somewhere. But that meant unsoldering and resoldering while everything was already packed together, which is so much worse than doing it on a breadboard. Nothing has room, nothing is accessible and im trying not to melt the wire next to the one im actually working on.

Then the SD card. I had planned the whole time to save photos to the SD slot on the screen module, and it would not write at all. Turns out the reason is the camera sensor already takes up almost every usable pin on this board, and the pins the SD card needs are the same ones I had already given to the screen. The couple of pins that were still free after that are the serial lines the USB programmer uses, and one of those went to the shutter button. So there was genuinely nothing left for it. It was never going to work with the way I had it wired.

Spent a long time trying to make it work anyway before accepting that. Very tired by this point.

So I dropped SD entirely and made it save to the ESP32s internal flash instead, then put a web server on the camera so it hosts its own wifi network. Connect to it from your phone, open the page and you get every photo on the device with download and delete.

Honestly this ended up being way better than the SD card ever would have been. No pulling a card out and finding a reader every time I want to see what I shot, I just connect and pull them straight to my phone.

Lesson from all of this, I am never soldering a whole build together again without testing every single part wired up together first. Test the finished layout, not the individual pieces.