Thoughts on the first parts

I can’t actually believe I’m going ahead with this project. I didn’t quite think I would until, on Thursday, I was holding a little keypad in one hand and a microcontroller in the other. I’d had a poor night’s sleep, been working from 3 in the morning, and hadn’t shaved, so was feeling a bit rough.

Me at my desk, headphones in, unshaven but triumphant with the first bit of hardware in-hand.

So!

What do I think of the parts I’ve got so far?

The keypad is fine. Its clicky buttons are easy to press and satisfying. There’s no tactile mark on the 5, which is a shame. but even so, it’s a potential candidate for reuse. Absolutely fine for the prototyping.

The front face of the keypad, with its 4 screw holes visible at the corners

The Microcontroller looks ideal.

A view of the microcontroller, showing its USB-C port and various bits of technology attached to the underside

It has a little 1.9 inch screen, which is a bit useless for my needs, but the relatively high memory space (16MB), plus SD card and composite USB-class behaviour make it an otherwise excellent choice for this project. I opted for the non touch version and it still cost 30 quid, which makes it the second most expensive part of the kit so far. Even with all the onboard things taking up pins, there should be plenty left over for the keypad and everything else we want to connect. The keypad alone is going to need over half a dozen.

I have not yet been able to test out the speaker.

The little oval speaker, trailing red and black wires.

How this thing sounds will be important, but I’m personally almost always going to be using headphones (unless I’m showing it off to people). The speakers were really cheap and, at the prototype stage, that’s just fine.

I don’t have anything else worth talking about yet, although I was thinking about attachment: my old Road Runner and Book Courier both had lovely belt clips. The only other devices I own at present with such a feature are my Sandisk clip plus MP3 player and the Olympus DM-whatever-it-is voice recorder.

The CL-4 clip on the back of the Olympus Digital Recorder

I’d wondered if I could save printing a clip if we engineered a socket for these, but they’re quite pricy! So that’s shipment 1 of 3. Next, the breadboard and jumper cables. Finally, sometime this week we’ll have the v-stamp, and then actual work can begin.