Updated Pinout, Button wired, Mounted 2nd USB hub

as the title implies, i did those things??? not much done really I didn’t really know what to do next but the leds on the button are uhh not working unless im misunderstanding the pinout on the manufacturers details page thats it for today!

did the sticky streak so now i have to slave on this platform again

I actually didn’t do much?
I just updated the repo it was quite old and outdated (pre-outpost-funding) so now its got updated build status and such, and there’s a new diagram for the parts layout as it has changed ALOT since I like purchased the wrong case that was too small

its been a while since i made one of these
…

like a whole week

anyways!
today I got a bunch of stuff installed
the USB C port is now mounted??
the AUX ports are mounted!!
the batteries and pcb are mounted fully!??!!
the first USB hub is mounted%#(!@#$(@#»>?
and it all works so far)!)#@($&!#@&%)!#&^%)(&#!%

yeah!
oh the fan too i guess… yay?
so now some of the gpio is wired and for the fan I did have to uh use “questionable” tactics to get a big enough hole (a drill bit that is way to strong and started tear up the plastic) anyways after that minor inconvenience I also got all the IO and such mounted the only thing not mounted is the plastic board/lid that will sit on top and in the sake of time (and finishing this before stardance ends and this becomes another failed project) I will not be really finishing all the software stuff as the operating system hates me although it may be a display issue with just the monitor and I may be able to fix it later when its plugged into a normal monitor I also soldered some of the pins on the power button but it may be incorrect depending on what orientation i installed it (theres no indicatin of what side is up and the pins are symettrical) I do really like the way it looks so far! my english teacher would kill me if they saw that sentence

some photos I guess because this journal is over now.

configuration!

did some configuration on the kickdeck now that most of the stuff is installed… i dont have much time to write this but at the moment the internet is just not working on it and its kinda pmo

the battery nightmare is over

so after many encountered problems with my battery (not necessarily the battery module but the fact that I’m reforming it) I have most probably fixed it and its now in a form factor that will fit in the case but it’s technically untested because I’m waiting on feedback from someone with an electronics degree but essentially the board that I snapped off of it had 2 purposes (kinda 3 with warning leds) which is to hold the battery packs and such and to put them in series. That is all the board does (electronically), is put it in series also technically has 3 extra wires to evenly distribute charging but that has also been done with the current wiring situation, I would assume as nothing started smoking that it will probably… not blow up my k2b board but who knows, I’ll wait on a response and then I will be very close to finishing this thing (everything else SHOULD be straight forward for just mounting it all) I also read up on the Waveshare docs and it does not have 4 pogo pins for no reason, I already knew they were for installing a Raspberry Pi on top with the mounting holes (which is why its the HAT (E) module) but it has 2 pins for SDA and SCL which are for transmitting the battery data on how charged it is which previously I thought I may not be able to add a low battery indicator because I wouldn’t be able to pull battery data but I can I just need to do a cursed thing of soldering a wire to a pogo pin

right in the middle of this they responded and says it should work! next devlog soon i suppose…

desoldering the board!

yes i actually did it (crazy)
no not really i ended up snapping off the second board because it actually doesn’t have anything else on it i guess, all it does is wire the batteries in series and it had 5 notches only for even power distribution

i can officially have a less cursed device

Screen Installation + desoldering battery module

I installed the screen onto the lid area by melting in brass standoffs and also tested the button which I ordered to be a latching button and the one that arrived is apparently momentary… which means I have to shut it down digitally sadly which means the power efficiency may be worse overall after this I grabbed my fan which is 24V despite ordering 5v… but i found a lower voltage fan I pulled from a cable tv box that was 12v and still blew moderately fast at 5v power and after that I desoldered most of the battery module since with the case restraints it wont fit normally so I’m desoldering the bottom board as it assembles with notches + holes between 2 pcbs and also removed the battery slots so I could better remove the pcb but I am yet to fully separate them thats all for now I might install the fan + k2b next

flashing armbian + installing leds

sadly ubuntu would not properly utilize the onboard graphics card and was putting a ton of stress onto the CPU to render everything so today I flashed Armbian onto the board and so far it all works but its the minimal Debian version (trixie) that has no GUI at the moment but I have also drilled holes for and mounted the panel mount LEDs which I was going to have one indicate low battery but I cant really do that so it may be just a power indicator or something else, didn’t get this on lapse but I did mount the power button too! (pictures below)

woah…
yeah so my parts all came and such and now stardance is integrated properly with hardware which means i have to make these on platform again so excuse the time gap in journals you can find the rest in my repo on the JOURNAL.MD

i did some things
essentially just flashed the card with ubuntu and such which is Jammy Jelly and uh after a bit realized that the gpu isnt working properly and probably wont as long as i use ubuntu which is sad because its supposed to be an official image.
so im having to switch to a community armbian image which should be fine cause i have a v1.1 board and theres a much better-ly integrated image for it on that board
(excuse low quality screenshots from lapse :/)

my silly webos

devlog #1

i finished my welcome screen!

after many formattings, i have made a messagebox resembling windows vista!

i would have to say the silliest part about this coding segment has to be that i spent 5 minutes trying to resize the info icon in the corner just to realize that i wasn’t specifying pixels so my formatting wasn’t doing anything at all…i wont make that mistake again.

this also took alot of eyeballing the sizes!! i had to use very weird font sizes (which aren’t multiples nor powers of 2) to get my reference picture to match close enough to my site. i would have to say that a LARGE chunk of my coding was simply editing font sizes, modifying margin sizes, and modifying the header color, because i found it SUPER hard to get a good header color. i eventually just gave up trying to use vista images and just took a snippet of the header color from my own windows 10 install.

i also found it kind of hard as to what to write. i was going to settle on saying my hobbies, likes, etc. but i thought that would be quite personal of myself, so i settled on the main theater: my hack clubbing adventure.

this devlog also marks the finish of the first part of the webOS batch! i think in the future, i will swap the windows xp info icon with one from windows 7 and maybe add a button to the bottom of my welcome screen that closes the welcome screen if you press it!? (take notes future argentiniandrinkcoaster…)

thank you @lowpolyphosphorus for helping me with the divider at the bottom (the silly grey box) and the height of the header relative to the icon!

new project!

i need stipends for outpost therefore i will be making this

why is it better?

Because I hate the normal GitHub bot, it just sends all the messages for commits in the channel and i make up to like 60 commits a day and as you can see in the photos below it kinda floods the channel!

the problem

too much going on across repos, kept missing PRs/issues/commits/CI status. wanted it all in Slack automatically, but not as a spammy live feed

the plan

• PRs/issues, post immediately
• new repos auto covered, zero setup
• commits collapsed into one thread per day instead of a message per push
• Actions failures post immediately
• Actions daily summary, one message that updates itself all day

the name

its kinda a joke but that is what it is, very descriptive and true imo

setup

• Slack app scoped to chat:write, channels:history, channels:read
• GitHub App, read only perms, subscribed to push/pr/issues/repository/workflow_run, installed on all repos
• deployed on Fly.io

bugs?

there weren’t any surprisingly but the hosting plan defaulted to listen on port 8080 and I had the bot set to 3000 took me a while figure that out but after a bit I found it said
WARNING The app is not listening on the expected address node server.js [::]:3000

status: alive

GitHub App installed, Slack app in the channel, deployed on Fly, webhook wired up, port bug fixed and confirmed reachable

more stuff to come:

• Slack OAuth (“Add to Slack” button) users connect their own workspace/channel instead of manual tokens
• GitHub App per-user install each user installs on their own account/org instead of sharing yours
• small web dashboard connect accounts + pick settings instead of editing env vars
• a real database needed once you’re tracking multiple workspaces/installs at once
• slash commands (/ghbot settings) let users self-serve config without touching code

new project??

yeah… another project
I start making a new project I have titled roomsense which will use a ESP32 with multiple sensors as a stupid little home assistant thing (it will be running ESPHome) I have plans to incorporate a mmWave sensor (thanks @Anson from stasis) a DHT11 temp/humidity sensor and a sound level sensor (KY-037) I was originally going to use a PIR or HC-SR04 sensor but tbh they’re mid and I’m wasting a whole ESP32 on this so I’m using my mmWave from anSON I made my BOM, and then did the pinout also did a visual wiring diagram on draw.io and made a full readme that is mostly full of placeholders because I haven’t done anything else

i don’t know how this took 2 HOURS

the repo can be found here

the bom is here

my beautiful (crappy) wiring diagram is here

my sweet anson can be found here

Welcome to Stardance!

another devlog!

UPS HAT

• onboard power switch is a tiny physical switch and there is NO seperate gpio header for it :( so the panel power button will have to wire in parallel (or cut off the switch)

Power button

• turns out its an RGB pushbutton (im blind) and not single color, but I have decided to keep it since it looks good and I will be only wiring the green led line

OLED + GPIO resolved !

• I got the real KickPi 20 pin diagram with correct pins
• OLED: i2C4 on pins 9/13, no adapter needed
• rotary encoder: assigned CLK/DT/SW/VCC/GND to free pins
  -2 indicator LEDs: one PWM-driven (dim HDD activity light, pin 10) and one plain GPIO (battery/low-battery warning, pin 12), found by confirming actually has 2 real PWM channels broken (Pin 8/10)

Docs

• finalized README, finalized BOM, finalized pinout.txt

Paper sketch thing

• I documented my planned organization and placement for all the parts on paper

everything else

• I made some updates to the BOM to use 2 usb hubs also added a rotary encoder and some other stuff
• the rest of the stuff thats still open is what material to use for the case mounting stuff and cable management

Stardance doesn’t seem to support markdown CSV ??? so here’s a screenshot, its also on the repo here

BOM Finalization (mostly)

UPS Module

continuing from the last journal, I started off with the Waveshare UPS HAT (B) designed for dual 18650 Li-ion batteries since it has usb output and i2c battery monitoring but it used pogo pins to clip into the RPi for power delivery which wouldn’t work with the K2B, then i switched to the (D) model briefly it used a single 21700 cell but it only outputs ~4A while charging actively and would drop as the battery depletes which would cause problems with my estimated power draw. I settled on the UPS HAT (E) running on 4 21700 Li-ions and had 6A output clearing the draw estimate with a margin so its my final pick. I also realized that all the boards only have one shared USB output port which means I will have to use a USB hub since I cant use that USB port.

Battery sourcing

I literally couldn’t find any listings on Amazon for the right 21700 battery or on AliExpress either… the only place I could find one has them at $9.00 a piece but if I can get this done on time it will still be on sale for ~$6.00 on the 18650 Battery Store (which has more than just 18650s )

OLED wiring (not published/done)

I originally planned to get a USB I2C adapter since the GPIO is unconfirmed :/ but I found the official pinout on their info PDF also confirmed there were the right pins for the OLED I already have (ideaspark SSD1306) that accepts 3.3-5V so no mismatch risk!

Budget

so far the price I have is at about $120 in unpurchased parts ($200 if i didnt own alot of the parts )

Fan

I was going to use a fan I already have but the fan uses 12V which would run horribly on the 5V rail

unresolved stuffs

• mounting material?? ( like plastic PLA boards i have already or 3D printing)
• cable management (idk if its going to be enough of a problem?)
• thats about it

BOM Research

did some BOM research
so far I did the following:

• confirmed K2B (V1.1) and 7” display both work; touch input functional, mounting holes good
• identified Android TV navigation issue (no back button, requires restart, so any hopes of using the stock OS are gone)
• built out the BOM on Notion
• resolved KickPi PDF voltage contradiction confirmed K2B runs 5V (Type-C), not 12V as one table mistakenly stated
• currently i decided on the Waveshare UPS HAT (B) 5V output, dual 18650, I2C monitoring as a UPS module
• found keyboard+touchpad combo, eliminating need for separate trackpad/trackball
• worked out full USB port budget: touch data + keyboard combo fit K2B’s 2 native ports with no hub; hub only needed once OLED is added later
• picked power button: 16mm, self-locking, LED ring, 3-6V, 3A, aluminum alloy