This week I made a lot of progress on my PCB. I fixed the issue with the circle shaped pin headers by sending the file to Cormac's computer, which somehow fixed the whole issue. I also added some mounting holes to put screws into, but the whole PCB wasn't really even and had things all over the place, which didn't bother me at the time. Cormac helped me to mill it again, and it cut the pins as ovals, not circles which is what they are supposed to be. After finding connecters and 3 pin headers for the metro mini and the IR receiver and Neopixel strip, I put them all in only to discover a new issue. The pin header for the receiver was blocked by little bit of the metro mini that sticks out at the end, meaning I couldn't use it. I then had to redesign the PCB, putting the pin header sideways instead of vertically like they were before. I also cleaned the whole design up like I said earlier, making the mounting holes even and making all four sides the same shape. I milled it and put all the components in to check if it fit, which it did.
The next step was to solder everything to the PCB. I'm lucky because I only have three components to solder, so I had Q refresh my memory. He soldered a pin or two and after getting the hang of it I was able to solder everything very well, which surprised me. A couple pins looked funny, but they worked and I can live with it. I then tested the PCB with my final code, and it worked perfectly. After a little bit of testing though, I noticed a couple issues. The first one wasn't serious since I need to buy a new Neopixel strip eventually, but the one I have now had horrible soldering and flickers when I'm testing it sometimes. I have to manually reposition it and play with the wires for it to properly light up, but I found a nine foot long strip on Amazon that can solve that issue. The other issue is one I'm trying to fix right now, which is that on the two settings that involve movement (around and fade), stop working after a few cycles, which I noticed before I started making my PCB but forgot to fix. Other than that, I made some good progress this week and I hope to fix the settings issue by next week.
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