This post was originally published on November 20, 2017 at https://sparklechicken.net/channel/jakessbc

The Strike and Dipper is dead. Long live the Strike and Dipper!

I have been beating my head against the Metro M0 Express for three weeks now, trying to bend it to my will. The SoftwareSerial library doesn’t work on it, but it has six serial ports built into hardware. Of those, one is configured by default for I2C, one for SPI, and one for UART. The other three need to be defined as one of those three protocols and properly instantiated. For the life of me, I could not get Sercom2 properly functioning. I threw the GPS back onto Sercom0, Serial1, and it started sporadically working there. I turned my attention to the SD card. The SD card reader uses SPI, and I realized fairly quickly that the preconfigured SPI pins are completely occluded by the display shield. I’d need to instantiate Sercom2 as a SPI interface to work with the shield, and with all the difficulties I’d had setting it up as UART I abandoned the idea.

That means that I’m dumping the LCD Keypad display. I’ll be switching to an I2C OLED display in the next little while, and concentrating on getting the guts to play nicely with each other in the meantime. More updates coming soon!