u/sdblondeaux

When I started doing research for this project, they said I needed a breadboard, so I pulled out my cutting board and looked at it very confused.

I’m only joking, but I really had no idea what I was doing.

I spent months researching, figuring out what parts I thought I needed, purchasing them online, and waiting for everything to come in the mail.

Once it all came in, I realized my initial idea wasn’t going to work.

My original idea was to make a wristband that my daughter could wear. If she needed us, she could just press a button on her wrist. The problem was that I was not going to be able to fit all of the components I needed into something that small, especially when I had never built anything electronic before.

So I put everything in a box.

And it sat in my garage for weeks. Maybe months.

Eventually I decided to change the idea. Instead of something she wore, I would make buttons that could be placed around the house. One in her room, one in the bathroom, wherever we needed them.

If she needed us, she could press the button.
Then I would make another button that could sit somewhere in a common area of the house. When me or my wife saw the alert, we could press that button to acknowledge it and let her know we heard her.

So I got to work.

I got out the breadboard and started plugging in wires.
This got messy and confusing really quickly.

I had made a wiring diagram beforehand, so I just kept plugging wires in where I thought they were supposed to go. Eventually I had this tangled mess of wires sitting in front of me, but as far as I could tell everything was where it was supposed to be.

Now it was finally time to plug it into the wall, so I plugged it in.

And, probably no surprise for someone who had never done this before, absolutely nothing happened.

I assumed I must have put a wire in the wrong spot. After reading enough horror stories online, I was also kind of waiting for something to catch on fire or explode.

Thankfully that didn’t happen either.

I kept looking at it, Googling things, checking wires, trying to figure out what I had done wrong.

I stared at this thing for hours.

Then I finally realized something.
I never soldered the header pins onto the microcontroller or the radio module.
They were literally just sitting there.
Not connected to anything.
So yeah, no wonder it didn’t work.

I got out my AA battery-powered soldering gun, which gets hot for about three seconds at a time and takes approximately seven years to heat back up, and started soldering all of the pins.

Eventually the microcontroller and radio module were actually connected to the circuit.

I plugged it in again.
The LEDs lit up.

I was so excited.

I immediately wanted to start building the second button, but then I realized I had just spent about six hours of my day getting one breadboard working and I did not have another six hours in me, so I was done for the day.

A day or two later, once I finally had the time and mental fortitude to do it again, I started building the second one.
This time I knew all of the mistakes I had made on the first one.

I put it together in a fraction of the time.
And somehow, it worked on the first try.

Now it was time to see if the actual idea worked.

I pressed the button on the first breadboard.
The white LEDs started flashing red.
Exactly what I hoped would happen.

Then I pressed the button on the second breadboard.
The first one turned green.
That was a pretty major milestone for me.

I had made two separate circuits that could communicate with each other. One could send out an alert when a button was pressed, and the other could send an acknowledgment back.

I had spent months thinking about this, weeks researching wiring and reading manuals, and days actually trying to put it together.

And at the end of all of that, all I really did was make an LED change colors when I pressed a button.
It may not seem like much.
But it was incredibly exciting.