Over the weekend I attended an introduction to PCB building class at Freeside Atlanta. They are an exceptionally friendly and welcoming group with an awesome space full of all the goodies I could ever hope to have access to for electronics, metal, wood working, and even blacksmithing, but sadly I live much too far away and would use the space too little to justify the membership costs. 11/10, would recommend them to anyone living near the airport.
With a few more hours work the next day, I’ve constructed and ordered my first prototype PCB for the coop controller:
The v3 prototype is probably not going to make it to the coop because it really needs longer screws and spacers to fit comfortably in the outdoor enclosure, and that just feels wasteful to track down and buy for what was intended to be an extremely temporary solution, so hopefully when this PCB gets here it actually works 🤣
I also ordered Omlet’s new smart controller. For science.
It appears to be trivial to replace the firmware but trying to hack on that isn’t high on my priority list right now. I am curious if it has a real-time clock module — the “RTC” built-in to the ESP32-S3 is a clock that ticks, not a clock that follows and preserves Earth time after power loss like found in a typical computer — but the markings on all the ICs are obscured by a coating.