Its a bit of a struggle to maintain a positive outlook today.
After weeks of struggling to upgrade my OS, I wasn’t even able to enjoy the success of having it work for 24 hours before it imploded.
It feels like the umpteenth time that I have to stop all attempts at making progress and address something that I just spent too much time troubleshooting.

While working on updating the code for the A vs X data streams, the LCD stopped displaying data. All I get are flicking white boxes which may, if I’m lucky (note sarcasm) display garbage characters instead of white boxes depending on the whims of the universe.

At first, I thought it was a result of some of the code I had changed, so restored from my backup and the screen still wasn’t cooperating. (Data was still hitting the internet)

Not wanting to make things worse, I decided to shut down for the day and tackle it in the morning with a fresh mind.
When I hit it this AM with a fresh coffee and set of fresh eyes, I triple checked that I was grabbing the right file, and the LCD still wasn’t populating (aside from a series of white boxes).

As another test, I went back even further, and loaded the sketch I wrote for the initial Boot-up / splash screen that plays in a loop… no wifi connection or data feed required.

It isn’t working either… I’m feeling some kind of deflated right now, and my mood has turned to absolute garbage… it kinda flipped from “I can’t believe I finally got it!!”, to “why did let myself think it was actually going to work?” I had honestly thought that I was at the point of the build where the heavy lifting was over with Marla, now that all of the data was finally going where it was supposed to go, and I could reward myself by getting into some of the fun parts of the build, like organizing/putting the SenPaks together, figuring out the best way to incorporate the bank of NeoPixels, adding a Data upload button, and piezo speaker.

Regardless, venting isn’t going to get it fixed any sooner… but I think it did help me clear my head a little.
Thinking this out: If all the code that used to work, doesn’t; that means its a hardware issue, right?

Guess I know how I’m going to be spending my day today… pulling out the [censored] protoboard and checking it for loose or broken connections.

So help me if I don’t find anything…