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Large OLED Assembly

Here are your assembly instructions for the Large OLED clock kit. This kit comes with a Raspberry Pi W, a nice large 2.24" OLED display and a DS3132 real-time clock. You can also optionally mount a speaker for an alarm clock. Time can be set using three buttons (mode-set, increment (+) and decrement (-))

Kit Parts List

  1. Plexiglass base with holes in front
  2. 4 felt pads for the feet
  3. Breadboard - 1/2 size - 30 rows - 400 ties
  4. Raspberry Pi Pico W with header pins installed
  5. OLED display (2.42" 128X64)
  6. 7 wire display cable (20cm M-F)
  7. Real time clock (DS3132)
  8. CR2032 coin-cell battery
  9. 4-wire real-time clock cable (20cm M-F)
  10. 3 momentary push buttons - long for set, short for +/-
  11. 5 black ground wires for buttons
  12. 3 button wires (yellow, blue and green)
  13. 1 red power jumper (3.3 to bus)
  14. 3 cable ties
  15. USB connector (A to micro)
  16. 5-volt USB power adapter

Assembly Steps

Prepare Plexiglass Base

Peal the protective backing off of both sides of the plexiglass base. You might need to use your fingernails or a knife to peal up the corner.

Attach Felt Pads to Base

Attach the 4 felt pads to the corners of the base by pealing the release liner off each pad and placing each one in each corner. If you are using cable ties on the display, make sure you leave room for the cable ties and positions the felt pads in about 1/4 of an inch from the side edges.

This will be the bottom of your clock.

Attach Breadboard to Base

Peal off the release liner for the solderless 1/2 breadboard and place it in the center of the top base with row 1 on the right and row 30 on the left as you face from the front of the clock. Note that the top of the breadboard is row 1 and the bottom is row 30.

Install Pico W on Breadboard

Put the Raspberry Pi Pico W into the breadboard making sure that USB connector is at the top of the breadboard (row 1) and the pins are aligned like the diagram. The header pins on the Raspberry Pi Pico W will be in columns "c" and "h".

3.3 V Red Bus Jumper

Use the red jumper wire to connect right row 5 (3.3 OUT) to the red power bus on the right. Both the OLED display and the real-time clock will connect their power to this right power rail.

Black Ground Jumper

Attach the black jumper wire from row 8 on the right to the blue bus GND. Note all rows that end in the digit 3 or 8 are GND (3,8,13,18). Your breadboard may have a black mark on the breadboard on these rows. This connection allows the entire left power rail to be GND.

Add Buttons

Place the three buttons on the breadboard over the center trough oriented so that the legs of the buttons are on opposite sides of the center trough and closing the switch will close the connection between the rows of the breadboard when pressed.

The internal connections of the buttons is shown below:

Wire Buttons

We are now ready to wire the three buttons up. Their job is to connect the pins on the lower left corner of the Pico W to GND when they are pressed. Each button has GND on the lower-left pin and signal on the upper-left corner of the button. The signal of the top button will go to row 17, the middle button to row 19 and the bottom button will go to row 20.

A logical diagram of the button circuit is shown below:

Here are the pin assignments will use in later labs:

Breadboard Row GPIO Pin Function
Row 17 GPIO 13 Set (Mode)
Row 19 GPIO 14 Increment
Row 20 GPIO 15 Decrement

Note

If you have your software loaded, you can run the 'buttons-test-print.py' to verify that the buttons are all connected correctly. This program will print the name of the button being pressed to the console. This is a great way to tell if you have missed any button connections.

Display Cable to OLED

Locate the 7-wire display cable harness. It has female pins on one end and make pins on the other end. The female pins will go into the OLED display. Note that you must hoop up the black wire to the GND connection and the purple wire to the CS connection. It is very easy to get this connection reversed, so double check the orientation.

Display Cable to Breadboard

Attached the display cable to the breadboard in the left side from rows 3 to 9. The orange wire should be in row 4, yellow in 5, green in 6, blue in 7, black in 8 and purple in 9.

Next, connect the red wire to the right side red power rail (3.3 volts)

Double check that the black wire is on the GND pin (row 8).
Make sure that the red wire is attached to right red positive power rail.

Install the Coin Cell Battery in the RTC

Place the CR2032 coin cell battery in the real-time clock (RTC) making sure the positive side is on the top. The coin cell battery needs to be tucked under the metal connector and pressed down. You may need a small screw driver to pry the batter back up to change it. Most

RTC Cable to RTC

Attach the 4-wire cable to there real time clock making sure that the black GND and the red VCC are connect to the correct pins, SDA is yellow and SCL is orange. The SQW and 32K pins are not used.

RTC Cable to Breadboard

Attach the other of the 4-wire real-time clock cable to the breadboard.
Connect yellow to row 1 on the left (GPIO 0) and orange on row 2 on the left (GPIO 1).
Connect the red wire to the red power rail on the right and the black wire to the GND on the right.

Cable Ties

(Optional) You can use cable ties or twist ties to connect the display and the RTC to the base through the holes.
If you are planning to build your own case you can skip this step.

Final Tests

After you assemble your clock kit you will be abel to test the connections using MicroPython. Here are some of the tests you will run:

  1. Use the blink to verify that your USB connection is not blocked by your PC/Mac and you have downloaded the correct version of the MicroPython runtime.

  2. Use the i2c scanner to verify that your real-time clock is connected correctly.

  3. Use the hello world program to test if your display is connected correctly.

  4. Use the button test program to test to see if your buttons are connected correctly.

Troubleshooting

You can use generative AI tool like ChatGPT or Anthropic Claude to help you debug the clock. Make sure you give a complete description of your problem using the following prompt template.

Prompt

Please help me diagnose a problem I am having with MicroPython program running on the Raspberry Pi Pico W. I am using a Mac to connect to the Pico with Thonny. I am using Thonny version 4.1.6 and Mac OS 15.0.1. When I run ls /dev/cu* I can see the device listed. When I press the Stop/Restart backend button I see the MicroPython version X on the console.

However, when I run X I get the following error: ...