Weekly Roundup 8-10-2023

What went wrong this week?

Alright, so I have decided to update my controls for my lights on my Bronco. I removed the Sam21rf pro board, 4 button neokey, 4 relay board, fuse block, bus bars, and a bunch of wires. From my Bronco to put in a Adafruit Macropad and 8 relay board. Along with other things to make it work. Only to find out that my Macropad is not working the way I programmed it to.

After I removed my old system I connected my new setup. My new setup worked on my test bench with no issues. Unfortunately when I brought my new setup over to my Bronco. Then connected everything for a test. I gave power to to the 8 relay board and Macropad. I discovered the Macropad won’t go passed the Adafruit splash screen. So I plugged it into my computer and get the same thing. So I reset it by holding down the boot button along with the reset button. Then put the demo program on it when it popped on my computer as a flash drive. And it went back to the demo setup. But the neopixels did not light up. I didn’t notice it because I forgot how the demo is supposed to look.

So then I put my old program I made to control the 8 relay board back on the Macropad but I got the same result. So I updated all of my libraries and still got the same thing after I reset it again. I then went into my program and see if I missed something that is causing the issue. I looked at my code and saw that there was | !ss.begin(); | in the code right after the speaker test. I removed the (!) thinking that It was getting stuck there in the code. I ran the code again and it made it passed the Adafruit splash screen that time.

I though I made progress but that was not the case. The real issue is that the stemma port is not seeing the i2c device correctly. I have a seesaw board connected to the Macropad to control the relays. The Macropad not being able to see the i2c device means that I can not control other things besides the Macropad itself. Also the neopixels are not working but the buttons are working which is weird.

Did you come to a solution?

Yeah to fix the issue I just went back to using the Sam21rf pro board and 4 button neokey. But I added a QT Py and an additional Neokey. To use the Sam21 rf board and Qt Py to control the 8 relay board. It gets the job done and I can rest a little bit until I think of something better.