Continuing work on the controller, I’m tidying up the rats nest that is the wiring.  The majority of this controller, and MacFeegle Prime for that matter, was designed or put together while massively sleep deprived or in a rush.  

Now I’ve a bit more time, because with PiWars 2020 postponed a few months I *clearly* didn’t have any back then, I’ve decided to use some PermaProto board and actual plugs to make it considerably tidier.

I started off by taking stock of what’s there, other than the mess.  I have a bus bar along the bottom that gives power and ground to the various switches and potentiometers, other than that everything just uses jumper wires to the various headers.

One thing I wanted to do was swap out the potentiometer that was on there for a snazzy rotary encoder that has an RGB LED and a push button too!  This does mean more pins but I’ve just enough so all good there.

Next up I mocked up all the parts in excel alongside the pins, it’s a nice way to keep track of things like this.  I then put all the sockets and whatnot on to some breadboard to make sure it all fit.

Yeah, so I keep forgetting that some of my breadboards are wider than permaproto by one row so when I tried to move over the buggers didn’t fit!

Thankfully I have some right angle sockets so I was able to move things around a bit, everything just fits but fit it does!

Having taken way longer than expected I’ve run out of spoons a little so rather than trying to push through and mess it up I’ll pick this up tomorrow.  Next post I’ll have everything wired in and the Teensy updated with code to use it all!