Devlog

Ok so I kind of locked in and one-shot this over the weekend, but here’s an overview of everything that I did. Basically I started with the schematic, which was 80% easy and 20% crazy rabbit-hole cuz I decided I really want the possibility to make this battery powered and to monitor the battery level. Afterwards I moved on to the PCB and routing, which didn’t take too long but I ended up spending wayyy too long on the silkscreen and finding a nice font and all. Anyways, I’m really happy with how it turned out, so it’s worth the 4-5 ish hours I put into it :)

CAD was awful at first. I was using FreeCAD, which is an awful experience imo (0 stars, would not recommend). Thankfully @EMT (formerly babydriver) saved me and showed me the joys of Onshape. I managed to get like 90% of the CAD done in about an hour and a half, which was awesome. I forget to record it with Lapse though 😭 There’s not really much more to say about the CAD, except maybe that I spent wayyy too long trying to make it perfectly symmetrical for the display so that it looks nice.

Finally for the firmware I used C++ with Platform IO in VS Code (yes I started Hackatime this time). It’s currently a first draft, as I need to have the parts to do some testing before I can continue. However as of now it supports going into deep sleep (safely hopefully), being woken by a keypress, and drawing a date, time, and battery percentage to the TFT display. I’m planning to add alarms, time sync over Wi-Fi, alarms, 12H-24H time toggling, and a little config over an AP (probably just as a website). Again though, I’m really stuck right now cuz of the charlieplexing (kind of shot myself in the foot lol). I understand the theory and all, but I just need to see it before I can work with it.

Anyways, that’s all for now. If anyone has any feedback that would be appreciated. If not, then thanks for reading this far and see y’all in the next one :)