Triumph over Adversity

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Today I nearly finished my camera remote control. I thought it was a simple enough project. But today, not really simple enough for me. Basically I took part in a festival of doing things wrong. The stars, in no particular order were:

  • Thinking that switching the ground power supply rail rather than the positive one was a good idea because I had an innovated (i.e. dangerous) split power delivery.

  • Building a battery pack that produces 9 volts before discovering that the servo can only handle 7 volts

  • Soldering the wrong wires on the switch

  • Soldering the right wires on the switch, but without putting the switch through the fitting hole

  • Soldering the right wires on the switch, having put the switch through the fitting hole but not added the fixing nut

  • Forgetting to connect 3.3v to the i2cv signal on the display so that I then spent 15 minutes trying to work out why the I2C lines weren’t powered properly.

  • Using == in an assignment by mistake: self.state==self.DELAY_SET compiles fine in Python, but doesn’t do what I want it to.

  • Plugging the 5V power signal onto a PICO input because a red wire looks very like an orange wire sometimes

  • Plugging the servo control signal onto the wrong PICO pin

Basically I got it right by doing everything possible wrong first. But at least it works now and I should be able to demonstrate it at DDD in two weeks time.