A Lesson in Fault Finding & Frustration, Plus Some Electronics

Well, this is embarrassing.

You’ll remember I added a reset switch to my Raspberry Pi 3. And then killed it. It was frustrating but it enabled me to get an upgrade to a 3B+ for my Kodi media centre. And then I cast the apparently dead board aside.

I then had that new 3B+ with one of my old SD cards in and it didn’t boot. And neither did the replacement - bit weird. But okay. I’d tested the cards in my laptop and they seemed to work, so I threw NOOBS on them and... still nothing.

I ended up desoldering the reset switch from the old Pi3 board and it still didn’t boot so I assumed there was an issue with that. Maybe shorted those pins out or something? I wicked off all the solder I could but nothing worked.

Okay, it’s two weeks later. New cards. And it works! What the hell? So the cards were on the way out all along? I eagerly grabbed my old Pi3 board and a new card and... it fucking boots!?

This is annoying - maybe the soldering WAS the thing that killed the cards. But that it took me so long to figure out that the board was still okay is irritating. It DOES mean that I have a spare board for a project now, though. More to follow, probably... when I think of something to do with it.

For now, though, I’m starting to get into this a little more seriously now. The LED matrix parts have arrived and I’ve organised everything into a nice carry case with dividers to make things easier to keep separated. Sometimes things slide a bit underneath the dividers but it’s much easier to do things when you have a box like this or drawers or whatever.

I’ve also made a start on the matrix by laying out some components on the perfboard, namely the first row of LEDs and some resistors, plus one of the male connectors for female DuPont plugs to go into. I’ve measured the space available and there’s room for 6x6 LEDs - smaller than planned but the perfboards are a lot smaller than I imagined. Nice for tiny projects though or switch assemblies. The board also is the first to be gripped securely by my new third hand gadget. Needs a bit of work to tighten up the screws during use but it really helps.

I’m not sure if I’ll have enough time for this as August arrives here in Edinburgh (note: I am posting this in early September - stay tuned to find out how leaving a project to one side for a month went...) as I have Fringe Festival commitments, but ideally I should at least finish one project anyway before starting another. I expect I’ll finish the game board from previous posts and only do one row of the matrix to test the process.

On another topic entirely I’d love to hear from anyone else doing the same kind of journey as me. Where are you at? Are you going faster than me? Am I just pissing about and not learning anything? Logic theory is hard and I just can’t visualise the gate layouts.