2/4/2026 10:28 AM - Obtaining Parts/First try

I am uploading a series of things I did but forgot to journal. All these are in 1-hour increments because that is how long my makerspace class, where I do the majority of my work, is.

Got my parts, tried to put together without solder to make sure it worked. It didn't. Thought it might have been an issue with the code, but no amount of changes could get anything done. I was banging my head against the wall for like an hour with no clue what I was doing. I started to consider other issues, but then had to go next class.

2/4/2026 10:36 AM - 3d printed case did not fit+trying to debug/identify problem

I am uploading a series of things I did but forgot to journal. All these are in 1-hour increments because that is how long my makerspace class, where I do the majority of my work, is.

I 3d printed my case, but realized that it was actually off-center/too much space for the rotary encoder and OLED screen, so I tightened those in Fusion and started the print
I also continued to bang my head against a wall in an attempt to figure out why It wasn't working. I had some of my more coding-oriented friends look at my code and they couldn't find any issue.

2/4/2026 10:48 AM - Found an issue

Now I am caught up on entries.

I FOUND AN ISSUE AND I REALLY HOPE IT WORKS IF FIXED

I Started with a bunch of debugging - I downloaded puTTY and used some commands in terminal to find the xiao while I was connected to be absolutely sure it wasn't an issue with my xiao or code, and it wasn't. The logs showed no errors, which meant It was time for me to turn to hardware. So I looked at my blueprint.

There it was. After talking with some others on slack, I realized I had not connected my oled and switches to the XIAO ground. This took forever to find, ty to @sub for the help, and So I am going to try and connect the terminals manually with a jumper wire to see if that is the problem, and if it is then I am going to one: explode and absolutely use my fist to make a hole in the wall, and two: Find a way to make that fix permanently. That could either be by connecting the GND on the blueprint and reprinting the PCB - however I was finding issues with that as the blueprint did not seem to allow me to connect the OLED gnd to the rotary GND - Use something called a GND Fill i think? (I would have to do more research on that one) or just sauter the jumper wire to the connections and live with the midly annoying less clean asthetic. I am also lookign at switchign from using KMK to HID, the built in keyboard on the XIAO

2/6/2026 - Began sautering+Sautering the ground

Today I went and began to sauter my board. Started off with practice on some wires as it was my first time sautering.

Then I began by sautering the switches, as I had many of them in case I made a mistake.

All went well, and I made sure to connect a wire to the ground where my OLED and switch's grounds are. Then I moved on to the microcontroller, which I did not finish, and also used some tape to hold the microcontroller and the pins in place. Here I had an issue where the pins would melt the plastic, causing them to slide, so I had to reheat them with the soldering iron and use pliers to push them back into place

I also had an issue when appling sauter to the pin where I needed to connect the wire to the ground, and the soldering iron heated up the whole line of wire and caused the solder on the other end to melt, severing the connection lol. Next time I will just melt the solder then put on the wire to avoid that issue.