Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 149

Today, I finally got in touch with the makers of the AlarmDecoder, Nu Tech Software Solutions. To be more accurate, I spent a bit over an hour on the phone with the owner and creator, Sean Mathews, trying to find out what was going wrong with my AD2PI. I seem to have broken it, too – it won’t talk to any of my remaining Raspberry Pis and he thinks something’s wrong with the GPIO connector on the AD2PI.

I bought the AD2PI several years ago, and was prepared to buy a replacement – but Sean is sending me the newest version (one which is less fragile!) for free. That is unbelievably good customer service and I’m amazed and delighted.

While we were working on the problem, we noticed that the Raspberry Pi was dying after about five minutes – that didn’t stop the debugging, but after we were done I took a closer look.

I was using the same Pi I was so happy about removing from the case last night. I should have used spudgers earlier in the process – my best guess is that I cracked a trace on the Pi’s printed circuit board (or maybe the whole board) when I was using screwdrivers to try to torque the Pi out of the case, and when it heats up after running for a few minutes, something moves and that’s the end of the story.

I’ve ordered two more Pi Zero Ws and should be back on the air in a few days.

While I was talking with Sean, he mentioned that he has a very cheap small HDMI monitor to attach to a Pi for testing, and that would be a good thing to use to let us see what music is playing on our Sonos. I need a new project, right? And I should have a spare Pi Zero W….