I’ve always been interested in working with, troubleshooting, and repairing PCB boards since I’ve been a teenager or so. While I have built a few machines since, it was mainly just an expensive Lego set. The repair side is what really interested me. Soldering components to board for either development or repair. Our project requires just this. The audio loop station that I have been developing with my partner uses the Teensy 4.1 microcontroller along with several other components. An audio adapter, buttons, potentiometers, and a small screen. Many of the components come in a bare form, meaning that they must have pins, wires, or whatever your project entails correctly soldered into place.
The Teensy is able to communicate with our selected components through a series of input and output pins. These I/O pins must be specified in our code so that Teensy knows where to send and receive its signals from. While the Arduino IDE makes this pretty straightforward, the learning curve on how to correctly meld everything together through I/O and our code has been challenging.
Right now I have been working on a UI to display the different functionalities of our project. While I have succeeded in displaying information, there is still so much to learn. There are numerous libraries that help with displaying information, but learning how to correctly use these requires the understanding of the individual functions and commands that are in each .h / .cpp file. When we are done we will probably have over 10 header/source files that will all be used by one single .ino file (the main file that Teensy will operate off of).
If I had to start all over I believe that we would have chosen the same components and the same developing environment. The hands-on aspect of our project is what I have been really enjoying. Rather than see code run on a computer screen, we can watch it all on a small screen with various inputs and outputs. I find myself in bed, trying to sleep, but thinking of all the different and fun projects that could be accomplished with this technology.
