Not so standard

Oh boy, it’s been a while since I’ve spent some quality time with my soldering iron, and I’ve been reminded (the hard way) that my soldering station was not set up with ergonomics in mind at all! From the time I sit at my desk in the lab, I have about 20 minutes until my neck starts complaining so I need to work in bits and spurts until I can find a better place to set my iron up.

My idea to set up a small circuit board with a set of rails on it to handle communication and power isn’t going to work, as there doesn’t appear to be a universal standard for pin layouts between sensors/add ons that use I2C communications. Where one device has pins 1 2 3 4, another had them as 2 1 3 4. Its not the end of the world, it just means things won’t be as tidy as I was hoping.

In the note of keeping things tidy. I need to go back and redo some of the connections I soldered this morning. I’m glad I circled back and rechecked my work from earlier because I almost had a problem.

I’m used to working with a solid core wire, and I’m using braided wire here, and I’ve noticed a couple of places where a rogue thread has escaped from the braid and could potentially cause a short. To remedy this moving forward I’m going to start cutting the wire on an angle for a more tapered tip for better inserting into the small holes of the proto board, furthermore I’m also going to snip/remove a portion of the threads to make the braid a little smaller in diameter.

I have to say that aside from needing to be extra careful with keeping my ends clean, I do like these braided wires. They’re more flexible and the sheath seems to be more heat tolerant/melt resistant.

And one closing thought… an extra, unexpected, bonus that came from installing the end caps is that the garden is a lot quieter.
There is a sucking sound that comes from one of the drainage lines that return the growing solution back into the reservoir, and adding those caps has significantly muffled the sound.