2019-10-03 (Th) Electronic Wind Chimes EWC_Handheld

At the heart of this project is the Feather system from Adafruit. Their purpose is to give a standard footprint to several different processors, access to the Adafruit IDE, and support onboard battery charging. Since portability was high on my list, that battery feature was enough to dive in, the Arduino support made it easy and the ESP32 processor with Bluetooth support was something I could expand into later if I feel ambitious.

There were only five inputs from my hardware, and the ESP32 had more than enough, but I wanted to keep the used pins and the spares separated. One side of the board had the necessary pins for the MIDI shield that would also be my sound module. Another scale-tipping feature was the FeatherWings which included an MP3/MIDI module, making the self-contained dream possible.
Planning for pins

Before this project started in earnest, I played around with the controller and sound card, so they were soldered together, but the chassis was too slim to fit the boards with their header pins and sockets. The sockets were removed from the Feather, which was a mistake. It took a grueling hour and would have been a better use of time to buy a new board. The pins on the FeatherWing were left attached but the plastic piece holding the pins together and in place was removed. Removing the plastic section would make it possible to pull them out one at a time if necessary.
Deconstructed controller and sound board

There might have been enough room to land all the wires directly on the controller or FeatherWing, but a prototyping board was more logical. Splitting off all the ground wires, five of them would have been tough without a protoboard, and three 10K ohm pull-up resistors aided the discrete inputs. The resistors were not visible in this picture. Wires were long enough to reach the final resting point of the board.
Breakout board inside chassis

The rest of the posts for this project have been arranged by date.

First time here?

Completed projects from year 1
Completed projects from year 2
Completed projects from year 3
Completed projects from year 4
Completed projects from year 5
Completed projects from year 6

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2019-06-27

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