FoodTimer | Final Progress

I had to admit that, it was indeed a disaster when you had to cope with thesis and your other final projects at the same time. I failed to accomplish a complete FoodTimer before today. But still, I'd like to share my trial and errors along the way and will make it done after presenting my thesis.

The Progress

Programming

After finishing the front-end development, I started to program the screen UI first. The first mistake was that I didn't check the compatibility of the TFT LCD screen with Arduino Nano. Most tutorials online were using Uno instead. I finished the program using static data in my text file and it so far looked pretty good.

When I started to transfer the microcontroller from Uno to Nano, the pinout of the LCD screen cannot match the pin on Arduino Nano. The real pain in the ass was that this LCD screen didn't have a datasheet even it looked like the same as the most Adafruit/digikey TFT LCD touchscreen. The pins were not commented. I looked into lots of tutorials and also the datasheet of multiple LCD screen but still cannot figure out the compatible pins on Nano.

Then I wondered, could I switch the microcontroller to UNO. The answer was soon denied since the UNO R3 didn't have an integrated WiFi module.

I was also thinking about making UNO and Arduino Nano to communicate with each other. I found the SoftSerial.h often used to communicate with 2 microcontrollers. But I just didn't have much time to test it.

Fabrication

Electronics

I actually ordered the PCB board for the mechanical rotary encoder. I tested it at first using perf board. To make it fit on the perfboard, I shorted its SWITCH pin with COM and only used 3 pins - COM, A, B pins. It cannot detect a clear step. So I designed and ordered pcb from JLCPCB.com. It hasn't arrived yet probably due to the national holiday in China these days.

Just got notified that my board was shipped.

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